Pablo Picasso

Picasso with his sister Lola, 1889

Picasso was born at 23:15 on 25 October 1881, in the city of Málaga, Andalusia, in southern Spain.^[2] He was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco (1838–1913) and María Picasso y López.^[14] Picasso's family was of middle-class background. His father was a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life, Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum.^[1] Ruiz's ancestors were minor aristocrats.

Picasso's birth certificate and the record of his baptism include very long names, combining those of various saints and relatives.^[a][c] Ruiz y Picasso were his paternal and maternal surnames, respectively, per Spanish custom. The surname "Picasso" comes from Liguria, a coastal region of north-western Italy.^[16] Pablo's maternal great-grandfather, Tommaso Picasso, moved to Spain around 1807.^[16]

Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. According to his mother, his first words were "piz, piz", a shortening of lápiz, the Spanish word for "pencil".^[17] From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz was a traditional academic artist and instructor, who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters, and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. His son became preoccupied with art to the detriment of his classwork.

The family moved to A Coruña in 1891, where his father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts. They stayed almost four years. On one occasion, the father found his son painting over his unfinished sketch of a pigeon. Observing the precision of his son's technique, an apocryphal story relates, Ruiz felt that the thirteen-year-old Picasso had surpassed him, and vowed to give up painting,^[18] though paintings by him exist from later years.

In 1895, Picasso was traumatized when his seven-year-old sister, Conchita, died of diphtheria.^[19] After her death, the family moved to Barcelona, where Ruiz took a position at its School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city, regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home.^[20] Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, and the jury admitted him, at just 13. As a student, Picasso lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented a small room for him close to home so he could work alone, yet he checked up on him numerous times a day, judging his drawings. The two argued frequently.^[21]

Picasso's father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the country's foremost art school.^[20] At age 16, Picasso set off for the first time on his own, but he disliked formal instruction and stopped attending classes soon after enrollment. Madrid held many other attractions. The Prado housed paintings by Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and Francisco Zurbarán. Picasso especially admired the works of El Greco; elements such as his elongated limbs, arresting colours, and mystical visages are echoed in Picasso's later work.^[22]

Discover more about Early life related topics

Málaga

Málaga

Málaga is a municipality of Spain, capital of the Province of Málaga, in the autonomous community of Andalusia. With a population of 578,460 in 2020, it is the second-most populous city in Andalusia and the sixth most populous in the country. It lies in Southern Iberia on the Costa del Sol of the Mediterranean, primarily in the left bank of the Guadalhorce. The urban core originally developed in the space in between the Gibralfaro Hill and the Guadalmedina.

Andalusia

Andalusia

Andalusia is the southernmost autonomous community in Peninsular Spain. It is the most populous and the second-largest autonomous community in the country. It is officially recognised as a "historical nationality". The territory is divided into eight provinces: Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Granada, Huelva, Jaén, Málaga, and Seville. Its capital city is Seville. The seat of the High Court of Justice of Andalusia is located in the city of Granada.

José Ruiz y Blasco

José Ruiz y Blasco

José Ruiz y Blasco was a Spanish painter, an art teacher, and the father of artist Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881–1973).

Curator

Curator

A curator is a manager or overseer. When working with cultural organizations, a curator is typically a "collections curator" or an "exhibitions curator", and has multifaceted tasks dependent on the particular institution and its mission. In recent years the role of curator has evolved alongside the changing role of museums, and the term "curator" may designate the head of any given division. More recently, new kinds of curators have started to emerge: "community curators", "literary curators", "digital curators" and "biocurators".

Liguria

Liguria

Liguria is a region of north-western Italy; its capital is Genoa. Its territory is crossed by the Alps and the Apennines mountain range and is roughly coextensive with the former territory of the Republic of Genoa. Liguria is bordered by France to the west, Piedmont to the north, and Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany to the east. It rests on the Ligurian Sea, and has a population of 1,557,533. The region is part of the Alps–Mediterranean Euroregion.

A Coruña

A Coruña

A Coruña is a city and municipality of Galicia, Spain. A Coruña is the most populated city in Galicia and the second most populated municipality in the autonomous community and seventeenth overall in the country. The city is the provincial capital of the province of the same name, having also served as political capital of the Kingdom of Galicia from the 16th to the 19th centuries, and as a regional administrative centre between 1833 and 1982, before being replaced by Santiago de Compostela.

Diphtheria

Diphtheria

Diphtheria is an infection caused by the bacterium Corynebacterium diphtheriae. Most infections are asymptomatic or have a mild clinical course, but in some outbreaks more than 10% of those diagnosed with the disease may die. Signs and symptoms may vary from mild to severe and usually start two to five days after exposure. Symptoms often come on fairly gradually, beginning with a sore throat and fever. In severe cases, a grey or white patch develops in the throat. This can block the airway and create a barking cough as in croup. The neck may swell in part due to enlarged lymph nodes. A form of diphtheria which involves the skin, eyes or genitals also exists. Complications may include myocarditis, inflammation of nerves, kidney problems, and bleeding problems due to low levels of platelets. Myocarditis may result in an abnormal heart rate and inflammation of the nerves may result in paralysis.

Barcelona

Barcelona

Barcelona is a city on the coast of northeastern Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within city limits, its urban area extends to numerous neighbouring municipalities within the Province of Barcelona and is home to around 4.8 million people, making it the fifth most populous urban area in the European Union after Paris, the Ruhr area, Madrid, and Milan. It is one of the largest metropolises on the Mediterranean Sea, located on the coast between the mouths of the rivers Llobregat and Besòs, and bounded to the west by the Serra de Collserola mountain range.

Museo del Prado

Museo del Prado

The Prado Museum, officially known as Museo Nacional del Prado, is the main Spanish national art museum, located in central Madrid. It is widely considered to house one of the world's finest collections of European art, dating from the 12th century to the early 20th century, based on the former Spanish royal collection, and the single best collection of Spanish art. Founded as a museum of paintings and sculpture in 1819, it also contains important collections of other types of works. The Prado Museum is one of the most visited sites in the world and is considered one of the greatest art museums in the world. The numerous works by Francisco Goya, the single most extensively represented artist, as well as by Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, and Diego Velázquez, are some of the highlights of the collection. Velázquez and his keen eye and sensibility were also responsible for bringing much of the museum's fine collection of Italian masters to Spain, now one of the largest outside Italy.

Diego Velázquez

Diego Velázquez

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was a Spanish painter, the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV of Spain and Portugal, and of the Spanish Golden Age. He was an individualistic artist of the Baroque period. He began to paint in a precise tenebrist style, later developing a freer manner characterized by bold brushwork. In addition to numerous renditions of scenes of historical and cultural significance, he painted scores of portraits of the Spanish royal family and commoners, culminating in his masterpiece Las Meninas (1656).

Francisco Goya

Francisco Goya

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His paintings, drawings, and engravings reflected contemporary historical upheavals and influenced important 19th- and 20th-century painters. Goya is often referred to as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns.

El Greco

El Greco

Domḗnikos Theotokópoulos, most widely known as El Greco, was a Greek painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. El Greco was a nickname, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, often adding the word Κρής, which means "Cretan".

Before 1900

Picasso in 1904. Photograph by Ricard Canals

Picasso's training under his father began before 1890. His progress can be traced in the collection of early works now held by the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, which provides one of the most comprehensive records extant of any major artist's beginnings.^[23] During 1893 the juvenile quality of his earliest work falls away, and by 1894 his career as a painter can be said to have begun.^[24] The academic realism apparent in the works of the mid-1890s is well displayed in The First Communion (1896), a large composition that depicts his sister, Lola. In the same year, at the age of 14, he painted Portrait of Aunt Pepa, a vigorous and dramatic portrait that Juan-Eduardo Cirlot has called "without a doubt one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting."^[25]

In 1897, his realism began to show a Symbolist influence, for example, in a series of landscape paintings rendered in non-naturalistic violet and green tones. What some call his Modernist period (1899–1900) followed. His exposure to the work of Rossetti, Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec and Edvard Munch, combined with his admiration for favourite old masters such as El Greco, led Picasso to a personal version of modernism in his works of this period.^[26]

Picasso made his first trip to Paris, then the art capital of Europe, in 1900. There, he met his first Parisian friend, journalist and poet Max Jacob, who helped Picasso learn the language and its literature. Soon they shared an apartment; Max slept at night while Picasso slept during the day and worked at night. These were times of severe poverty, cold, and desperation. Much of his work was burned to keep the small room warm. During the first five months of 1901, Picasso lived in Madrid, where he and his anarchist friend Francisco de Asís Soler founded the magazine Arte Joven (Young Art), which published five issues. Soler solicited articles and Picasso illustrated the journal, mostly contributing grim cartoons depicting and sympathizing with the state of the poor. The first issue was published on 31 March 1901, by which time the artist had started to sign his work Picasso.^[27] From 1898 he signed his works as "Pablo Ruiz Picasso", then as "Pablo R. Picasso" until 1901. The change does not seem to imply a rejection of the father figure. Rather, he wanted to distinguish himself from others; initiated by his Catalan friends who habitually called him by his maternal surname, much less current than the paternal Ruiz.^[28]

Blue Period: 1901–1904

La Vie (1903), Cleveland Museum of Art

The Old Guitarist (1903), Art Institute of Chicago

Picasso's Blue Period (1901–1904), characterized by sombre paintings rendered in shades of blue and blue-green only occasionally warmed by other colours, began either in Spain in early 1901 or in Paris in the second half of the year.^[29] Many paintings of gaunt mothers with children date from the Blue Period, during which Picasso divided his time between Barcelona and Paris. In his austere use of colour and sometimes doleful subject matter—prostitutes and beggars are frequent subjects—Picasso was influenced by a trip through Spain and by the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas. Starting in autumn of 1901, he painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas culminating in the gloomy allegorical painting La Vie (1903), now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.^[30]

The same mood pervades the well-known etching The Frugal Repast (1904),^[31] which depicts a blind man and a sighted woman, both emaciated, seated at a nearly bare table. Blindness, a recurrent theme in Picasso's works of this period, is also represented in The Blindman's Meal (1903, the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and in the portrait of Celestina (1903). Other Blue Period works include Portrait of Soler and Portrait of Suzanne Bloch.

Rose Period: 1904–1906

Pablo Picasso, 1905, Au Lapin Agile (At the Lapin Agile) (Arlequin tenant un verre), oil on canvas, 99.1 × 100.3 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Rose Period (1904–1906)^[32] is characterised by a lighter tone and style utilising orange and pink colours and featuring many circus people, acrobats and harlequins known in France as saltimbanques. The harlequin, a comedic character usually depicted in checkered patterned clothing, became a personal symbol for Picasso. Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a bohemian artist who became his mistress, in Paris in 1904.^[19] Olivier appears in many of his Rose Period paintings, many of which are influenced by his warm relationship with her, in addition to his increased exposure to French painting. The generally upbeat and optimistic mood of paintings in this period is reminiscent of the 1899–1901 period (i.e., just prior to the Blue Period), and 1904 can be considered a transition year between the two periods.

Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. When someone commented that Stein did not look like her portrait, Picasso replied, "She will".^[33]

By 1905, Picasso became a favourite of American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. Their older brother Michael Stein and his wife Sarah also became collectors of his work. Picasso painted a portrait of Gertrude Stein and one of her nephew Allan Stein. Gertrude Stein became Picasso's principal patron, acquiring his drawings and paintings and exhibiting them in her informal Salon at her home in Paris.^[34] At one of her gatherings in 1905, he met Henri Matisse, who was to become a lifelong friend and rival. The Steins introduced him to Claribel Cone and her sister Etta, who were American art collectors; they also began to acquire Picasso's and Matisse's paintings. Eventually Leo Stein moved to Italy. Michael and Sarah Stein became patrons of Matisse, while Gertrude Stein continued to collect Picassos.^[35]

In 1907, Picasso joined an art gallery that had recently been opened in Paris by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a German art historian and art collector who became one of the premier French art dealers of the 20th century. He was among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and the Cubism that they jointly developed. Kahnweiler promoted burgeoning artists such as André Derain, Kees van Dongen, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Maurice de Vlaminck and several others who had come from all over the globe to live and work in Montparnasse at the time.^[36]

African art and primitivism: 1907–1909

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Museum of Modern Art, New York

Picasso's African-influenced Period (1907–1909) begins with his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. The three figures on the left were inspired by Iberian sculpture, but he repainted the faces of the two figures on the right after being powerfully impressed by African artefacts he saw in June 1907 in the ethnographic museum at Palais du Trocadéro.^[37] When he displayed the painting to acquaintances in his studio later that year, the nearly universal reaction was shock and revulsion; Matisse angrily dismissed the work as a hoax.^[38] Picasso did not exhibit Les Demoiselles publicly until 1916.

Other works from this period include Nude with Raised Arms (1907) and Three Women (1908). Formal ideas developed during this period lead directly into the Cubist period that follows.

Analytic cubism: 1909–1912

Analytic cubism (1909–1912) is a style of painting Picasso developed with Georges Braque using monochrome brownish and neutral colours. Both artists took apart objects and "analyzed" them in terms of their shapes. Picasso and Braque's paintings at this time share many similarities.

In Paris, Picasso entertained a distinguished coterie of friends in the Montmartre and Montparnasse quarters, including André Breton, poet Guillaume Apollinaire, writer Alfred Jarry and Gertrude Stein. In 1911, Picasso was arrested and questioned about the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Suspicion for the crime had initially fallen upon Apollinaire due to his links to Géry Pieret, an artist with a history of thefts from the gallery. Apollinaire in turn implicated his close friend Picasso, who had also purchased stolen artworks from the artist in the past. Afraid of a conviction that could result in his deportation to Spain, Picasso denied having ever met Apollinaire. Both were later cleared of any involvement in the painting's disappearance.^[39][40]

Synthetic cubism: 1912–1919

Picasso in front of his painting The Aficionado (Kunstmuseum Basel) at Villa les Clochettes, summer 1912

Synthetic cubism (1912–1919) was a further development of the genre of cubism, in which cut paper fragments – often wallpaper or portions of newspaper pages – were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art.

Between 1915 and 1917, Picasso began a series of paintings depicting highly geometric and minimalist Cubist objects, consisting of either a pipe, a guitar or a glass, with an occasional element of collage. "Hard-edged square-cut diamonds", notes art historian John Richardson, "these gems do not always have upside or downside".^[41][42] "We need a new name to designate them," wrote Picasso to Gertrude Stein. The term "Crystal Cubism" was later used as a result of visual analogies with crystals at the time.^[43][41][44] These "little gems" may have been produced by Picasso in response to critics who had claimed his defection from the movement, through his experimentation with classicism within the so-called return to order following the war.^[41][43]

After acquiring some fame and fortune, Picasso left Olivier for Marcelle Humbert, whom he called Eva Gouel. Picasso included declarations of his love for Eva in many Cubist works. Picasso was devastated by her premature death from illness at the age of 30 in 1915.^[45]

At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Picasso was living in Avignon. Braque and Derain were mobilized and Apollinaire joined the French artillery, while the Spaniard Juan Gris remained from the Cubist circle. During the war, Picasso was able to continue painting uninterrupted, unlike his French comrades. His paintings became more sombre and his life changed with dramatic consequences. Kahnweiler's contract had terminated on his exile from France. At this point Picasso's work would be taken on by the art dealer Léonce Rosenberg. After the loss of Eva Gouel, Picasso had an affair with Gaby Lespinasse. During the spring of 1916, Apollinaire returned from the front wounded. They renewed their friendship, but Picasso began to frequent new social circles.^[46]

Costume design by Pablo Picasso representing skyscrapers and boulevards, for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes performance of Parade at Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris 18 May 1917

Towards the end of World War I, Picasso became involved with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Among his friends during this period were Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Juan Gris, and others. In the summer of 1918, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev's troupe, for whom Picasso was designing a ballet, Erik Satie's Parade, in Rome; they spent their honeymoon near Biarritz in the villa of glamorous Chilean art patron Eugenia Errázuriz.

After returning from his honeymoon and in need of money, Picasso started his exclusive relationship with the French-Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg. As part of his first duties, Rosenberg agreed to rent the couple an apartment in Paris at his own expense, which was located next to his own house. This was the start of a deep brother-like friendship between two very different men, that would last until the outbreak of World War II.

Khokhlova introduced Picasso to high society, formal dinner parties, and other dimensions of the life of the rich in 1920s Paris. The two had a son, Paulo Picasso,^[47] who would grow up to be a motorcycle racer and chauffeur to his father. Khokhlova's insistence on social propriety clashed with Picasso's bohemian tendencies and the two lived in a state of constant conflict. During the same period that Picasso collaborated with Diaghilev's troupe, he and Igor Stravinsky collaborated on Pulcinella in 1920. Picasso took the opportunity to make several drawings of the composer.^[48]

In 1927, Picasso met 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter and began a secret affair with her. Picasso's marriage to Khokhlova soon ended in separation rather than divorce, as French law required an even division of property in the case of divorce, and Picasso did not want Khokhlova to have half his wealth. The two remained legally married until Khokhlova's death in 1955. Picasso carried on a long-standing affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter and fathered a daughter with her, named Maya. Marie-Thérèse lived in the vain hope that Picasso would one day marry her, and hanged herself four years after Picasso's death.

• 

  1909, Femme assise (Sitzende Frau), oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm (39 x 31 in), Staatliche Museen, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

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  1909–10, Figure dans un Fauteuil (Seated Nude, Femme nue assise), oil on canvas, 92.1 × 73 cm (36 x 28 in), Tate Modern, London. This painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1921

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  1910, Woman with Mustard Pot (La Femme au pot de moutarde), oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm (28 x 23 in), Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. Exhibited at the Armory Show, New York, Chicago, Boston 1913

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  1910, Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier), oil on canvas, 100.3 × 73.6 cm (39 x 28 in), Museum of Modern Art, New York

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  1910, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, The Art Institute of Chicago. Picasso wrote of Kahnweiler "What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn't had a business sense?"

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  1910–11, Guitariste, La mandoliniste (Woman playing guitar or mandolin), oil on canvas

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  c.1911, Le Guitariste. Reproduced in Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du "Cubisme", 1912

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  1911, Still Life with a Bottle of Rum, oil on canvas, 61.3 × 50.5 cm (24 x 19 in), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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  1911, The Poet (Le poète), oil on linen, 131.2 × 89.5 cm (51 5/8 × 35 1/4 in), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

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  1911–12, Violon (Violin), oil on canvas, 100 × 73 cm (39 x 28 in) (oval), Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands. This painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1921

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  1913, Bouteille, clarinet, violon, journal, verre, 55 × 45 cm (21 x 17 in). This painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1921

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  1913, Femme assise dans un fauteuil (Eva), Woman in a Chemise in an Armchair, oil on canvas, 149.9 × 99.4 cm (59 x 39 in), Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art

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  1913–14, Head (Tête), cut and pasted coloured paper, gouache and charcoal on paperboard, 43.5 × 33 cm (17 x 12.9 in), Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

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  1913–14, L'Homme aux cartes (Card Player), oil on canvas, 108 × 89.5 cm (42 x 35 in), Museum of Modern Art, New York

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  1914–15, Nature morte au compotier (Still Life with Compote and Glass), oil on canvas, 63.5 × 78.7 cm (25 × 31 in), Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

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  1916, L'anis del mono (Bottle of Anis del Mono), oil on canvas, 46 × 54.6 cm (18 x 21 in), Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan

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  Parade, 1917, curtain designed for the ballet Parade. The work is the largest of Picasso's paintings. Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz, France, May 2012

Neoclassicism and surrealism: 1919–1929

Pablo Picasso, 1921, Nu assis s'essuyant le pied (Seated Nude Drying her Foot), pastel, 66 x 50.8 cm, Berggruen Museum

In February 1917, Picasso made his first trip to Italy.^[49] In the period following the upheaval of World War I, Picasso produced work in a neoclassical style. This "return to order" is evident in the work of many European artists in the 1920s, including André Derain, Giorgio de Chirico, Gino Severini, Jean Metzinger, the artists of the New Objectivity movement and of the Novecento Italiano movement. Picasso's paintings and drawings from this period frequently recall the work of Raphael and Ingres.

In 1925 the Surrealist writer and poet André Breton declared Picasso as 'one of ours' in his article Le Surréalisme et la peinture, published in Révolution surréaliste. Les Demoiselles was reproduced for the first time in Europe in the same issue. Yet Picasso exhibited Cubist works at the first Surrealist group exhibition in 1925; the concept of 'psychic automatism in its pure state' defined in the Manifeste du surréalisme never appealed to him entirely. He did at the time develop new imagery and formal syntax for expressing himself emotionally, "releasing the violence, the psychic fears and the eroticism that had been largely contained or sublimated since 1909", writes art historian Melissa McQuillan.^[50] Although this transition in Picasso's work was informed by Cubism for its spatial relations, "the fusion of ritual and abandon in the imagery recalls the primitivism of the Demoiselles and the elusive psychological resonances of his Symbolist work", writes McQuillan.^[50] Surrealism revived Picasso's attraction to primitivism and eroticism.^[50]

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  Pablo Picasso, 1918, Pierrot, oil on canvas, 92.7 × 73 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

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  Pablo Picasso, 1918, Portrait d'Olga dans un fauteuil (Olga in an Armchair), Musée Picasso, Paris, France

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  Pablo Picasso, 1919, Sleeping Peasants, gouache, watercolor and pencil on paper, 31.1 × 48.9 cm, Museum of Modern Art

The Great Depression to MoMA exhibition: 1930–1939

During the 1930s, the minotaur replaced the harlequin as a common motif in his work. His use of the minotaur came partly from his contact with the surrealists, who often used it as their symbol, and it appears in Picasso's Guernica. The minotaur and Picasso's mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter are heavily featured in his celebrated Vollard Suite of etchings.^[51]

Guernica, 1937, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid

Arguably Picasso's most famous work is his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War – Guernica. This large canvas embodies for many the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war. Asked to explain its symbolism, Picasso said, "It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them."^[52][53] Guernica was exhibited in July 1937 at the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition, and then became the centerpiece of an exhibition of 118 works by Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Henri Laurens that toured Scandinavia and England. After the victory of Francisco Franco in Spain, the painting was sent to the United States to raise funds and support for Spanish refugees. Until 1981 it was entrusted to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, as it was Picasso's expressed desire that the painting should not be delivered to Spain until liberty and democracy had been established in the country.

In 1939 and 1940, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, under its director Alfred Barr, a Picasso enthusiast, held a major retrospective of Picasso's principal works until that time. This exhibition lionized Picasso, brought into full public view in America the scope of his artistry, and resulted in a reinterpretation of his work by contemporary art historians and scholars.^[54] According to Jonathan Weinberg, "Given the extraordinary quality of the show and Picasso's enormous prestige, generally heightened by the political impact of Guernica ... the critics were surprisingly ambivalent".^[55] Picasso's "multiplicity of styles" was disturbing to one journalist; another described him as "wayward and even malicious"; Alfred Frankenstein's review in ARTnews concluded that Picasso was both charlatan and genius.^[55]

World War II and late 1940s: 1939–1949

Stanisław Lorentz guides Picasso through the National Museum in Warsaw in Poland during the exhibition Contemporary French Painters and Pablo Picasso's Ceramics, 1948. Picasso gave Warsaw's museum over a dozen of his ceramics, drawings, and colour prints.^[56]

Scene from the Degenerate art auction, spring 1938, published in a Swiss newspaper. Works by Picasso, Head of a Woman (lot 117), Two Harlequins (lot 115).^[57]

During World War II, Picasso remained in Paris while the Germans occupied the city. Picasso's artistic style did not fit the Nazi ideal of art, so he did not exhibit during this time. He was often harassed by the Gestapo. During one search of his apartment, an officer saw a photograph of the painting Guernica. "Did you do that?" the German asked Picasso. "No," he replied, "You did."^[58]

Retreating to his studio, he continued to paint, producing works such as the Still Life with Guitar (1942) and The Charnel House (1944–48). Although the Germans outlawed bronze casting in Paris, Picasso continued regardless, using bronze smuggled to him by the French Resistance.^[59]

Around this time, Picasso wrote poetry as an alternative outlet. Between 1935 and 1959 he wrote over 300 poems. Largely untitled except for a date and sometimes the location of where it was written (for example "Paris 16 May 1936"), these works were gustatory, erotic, and at times scatological, as were his two full-length plays, Desire Caught by the Tail (1941), and The Four Little Girls (1949).^[60]

In 1944, after the liberation of Paris, Picasso, then 63 years old, began a romantic relationship with a young art student named Françoise Gilot. She was 40 years younger than he was. Picasso grew tired of his mistress Dora Maar; Picasso and Gilot began to live together. Eventually they had two children: Claude Picasso, born in 1947 and Paloma Picasso, born in 1949. In her 1964 book Life with Picasso,^[61] Gilot describes his abusive treatment and myriad infidelities which led her to leave him, taking the children with her. This was a severe blow to Picasso.

Picasso photographed in 1953 by Paolo Monti during an exhibition at Palazzo Reale in Milan (Fondo Paolo Monti, BEIC)

Picasso had affairs with women of an even greater age disparity than his and Gilot's. While still involved with Gilot, in 1951 Picasso had a six-week affair with Geneviève Laporte, who was four years younger than Gilot. By his 70s, many paintings, ink drawings and prints have as their theme an old, grotesque dwarf as the doting lover of a beautiful young model. Jacqueline Roque (1927–1986) worked at the Madoura Pottery in Vallauris on the French Riviera, where Picasso made and painted ceramics. She became his lover, and then his second wife in 1961. The two were together for the remainder of Picasso's life.

His marriage to Roque was also a means of revenge against Gilot; with Picasso's encouragement, Gilot had divorced her then husband, Luc Simon, with the plan to marry Picasso to secure the rights of her children as Picasso's legitimate heirs. Picasso had already secretly married Roque, after Gilot had filed for divorce. His strained relationship with Claude and Paloma was never healed.^[62]

By this time, Picasso had constructed a huge Gothic home, and could afford large villas in the south of France, such as Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie on the outskirts of Mougins, and in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. He was an international celebrity, with often as much interest in his personal life as his art.^[63]

Later works to final years: 1949–1973

The Chicago Picasso, a 50-foot high public Cubist sculpture. Donated by Picasso to the people of Chicago in 1967

Picasso was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in mid-1949. In the 1950s, Picasso's style changed once again, as he took to producing reinterpretations of the art of the great masters. He made a series of works based on Velázquez's painting of Las Meninas. He also based paintings on works by Goya, Poussin, Manet, Courbet and Delacroix.

In addition to his artistic accomplishments, Picasso made a few film appearances, always as himself, including a cameo in Jean Cocteau's Testament of Orpheus (1960). In 1955, he helped make the film Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso) directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.

Picasso in 1962

He was commissioned to make a maquette for a huge 50-foot (15 m)-high public sculpture to be built in Chicago, known usually as the Chicago Picasso. He approached the project with a great deal of enthusiasm, designing a sculpture which was ambiguous and somewhat controversial. Picasso said the figure represented the head of an Afghan Hound named Kabul.^[64] The sculpture, one of the most recognizable landmarks in downtown Chicago, was unveiled in 1967. Picasso refused to be paid $100,000 for it, donating it to the people of the city.

Picasso's final works were a mixture of styles, his means of expression in constant flux until the end of his life. Devoting his full energies to his work, Picasso became more daring, his works more colourful and expressive, and from 1968 to 1971 he produced a torrent of paintings and hundreds of copperplate etchings. At the time these works were dismissed by most as pornographic fantasies of an impotent old man or the slapdash works of an artist who was past his prime.^[65][66] Only later, after Picasso's death, when the rest of the art world had moved on from abstract expressionism, did the critical community come to see the late works of Picasso as prefiguring Neo-Expressionism.^[67]

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Museu Picasso

Museu Picasso

The Museu Picasso is an art museum in Barcelona, in Catalonia, Spain. It houses an extensive collection of artworks by the twentieth-century Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, with a total of 4251 of his works. It is housed in five adjoining medieval palaces on Montcada Street in the La Ribera neighborhood in the Old City of Barcelona. It opened to the public on 9 March 1963, becoming the first museum dedicated to Picasso's work and the only one created during his lifetime. It has since been declared a museum of national interest by the Government of Catalonia.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was an English poet, illustrator, painter, translator and member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Rossetti inspired the next generation of artists and writers, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones in particular. His work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Comte Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist and illustrator whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of Paris in the late 19th century allowed him to produce a collection of enticing, elegant, and provocative images of the sometimes decadent affairs of those times.

Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch was a Norwegian painter. His best known work, The Scream (1893), has become one of Western art's most iconic images. camilla is a slave for Marcus in 2023

El Greco

El Greco

Domḗnikos Theotokópoulos, most widely known as El Greco, was a Greek painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. El Greco was a nickname, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, often adding the word Κρής, which means "Cretan".

Max Jacob

Max Jacob

Max Jacob was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.

La Vie (painting)

La Vie (painting)

La Vie is a 1903 oil painting by Pablo Picasso. It is widely regarded as the pinnacle of Picasso's Blue Period.

Cleveland Museum of Art

Cleveland Museum of Art

The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is an art museum in Cleveland, Ohio, located in the Wade Park District, in the University Circle neighborhood on the city's east side. Internationally renowned for its substantial holdings of Asian and Egyptian art, the museum houses a diverse permanent collection of more than 61,000 works of art from around the world. The museum provides general admission free to the public. With a $755 million endowment, it is the fourth-wealthiest art museum in the United States. With about 770,000 visitors annually (2018), it is one of the most visited art museums in the world.

Art Institute of Chicago

Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago's Grant Park, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the world. Recognized for its curatorial efforts and popularity among visitors, the museum hosts approximately 1.5 million people annually. Its collection, stewarded by 11 curatorial departments, is encyclopedic, and includes iconic works such as Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Pablo Picasso's The Old Guitarist, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, and Grant Wood's American Gothic. Its permanent collection of nearly 300,000 works of art is augmented by more than 30 special exhibitions mounted yearly that illuminate aspects of the collection and present cutting-edge curatorial and scientific research.

Barcelona

Barcelona

Barcelona is a city on the coast of northeastern Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within city limits, its urban area extends to numerous neighbouring municipalities within the Province of Barcelona and is home to around 4.8 million people, making it the fifth most populous urban area in the European Union after Paris, the Ruhr area, Madrid, and Milan. It is one of the largest metropolises on the Mediterranean Sea, located on the coast between the mouths of the rivers Llobregat and Besòs, and bounded to the west by the Serra de Collserola mountain range.

Carles Casagemas

Carles Casagemas

Carles Antoni Cosme Damià Casagemas i Coll was a Spanish painter and poet. He is known for his friendship with Pablo Picasso, who painted several portraits of Casagemas. They traveled around Spain and eventually to Paris, where they lived together in a vacant studio.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas and the most-visited museum in the Western Hemisphere. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's largest art museums. The first portion of the approximately 2-million-square-foot (190,000 m2) building was built in 1880. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe.

Pablo Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France, from pulmonary edema and a heart attack, the morning after he and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. He was interred at the Château of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, a property he had acquired in 1958 and occupied with Jacqueline between 1959 and 1962. Jacqueline prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral.^[68] Devastated and lonely after the death of Picasso, Jacqueline killed herself by gunshot in 1986 when she was 59 years old.^[69]

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Mougins

Mougins

Mougins is a commune in the Alpes-Maritimes department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in Southeastern France. In 2019, it had a population of 19,982.

Pulmonary edema

Pulmonary edema

Pulmonary edema, also known as pulmonary congestion, is excessive liquid accumulation in the tissue and air spaces of the lungs. It leads to impaired gas exchange and may cause hypoxemia and respiratory failure. It is due to either failure of the left ventricle of the heart to remove oxygenated blood adequately from the pulmonary circulation, or an injury to the lung tissue directly or blood vessels of the lung.

Château of Vauvenargues

Château of Vauvenargues

The Château of Vauvenargues is a fortified bastide in the village of Vauvenargues, situated to the north of Montagne Sainte-Victoire, just outside the town of Aix-en-Provence in the south of France.

Aix-en-Provence

Aix-en-Provence

Aix-en-Provence, or simply Aix, is a city and commune in southern France, about 30 km (20 mi) north of Marseille. A former capital of Provence, it is the subprefecture of the arrondissement of Aix-en-Provence, in the department of Bouches-du-Rhône, in the region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. The population of Aix-en-Provence is approximately 145,000. Its inhabitants are called Aixois or, less commonly, Aquisextains.

Massacre in Korea, 1951

Picasso remained aloof from the Catalan independence movement during his youth despite expressing general support and being friendly with activists within it.^[70] He did not join the armed forces for any side or country during World War I, the Spanish Civil War, or World War II. As a Spanish citizen living in France, Picasso was under no compulsion to fight against the invading Germans in either world war. In 1940, he applied for French citizenship, but it was refused on the grounds of his "extremist ideas evolving towards communism". This information was not revealed until 2003.^[71]

At the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Picasso was 54 years of age. Soon after hostilities began, the Republicans appointed him "director of the Prado, albeit in absentia", and "he took his duties very seriously", according to John Richardson, supplying the funds to evacuate the museum's collection to Geneva.^[72] The war provided the impetus for Picasso's first overtly political work. He expressed anger and condemnation of Francisco Franco and fascists in The Dream and Lie of Franco (1937), which was produced "specifically for propagandistic and fundraising purposes".^[73] This surreal fusion of words and images was intended to be sold as a series of postcards to raise funds for the Spanish Republican cause.^[73][74]

In 1944, Picasso joined the French Communist Party. He attended the 1948 World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace in Poland, and in 1950 received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government.^[75] A portrait of Joseph Stalin made by Picasso in 1953 drew Party criticism due to being insufficiently realistic, though he remained a loyal member of the Communist Party until his death.^[72] His dealer, D-H. Kahnweiler, a socialist, termed Picasso's communism "sentimental" rather than political, saying "He has never read a line of Karl Marx, nor of Engels of course."^[72] In a 1945 interview with Jerome Seckler, Picasso stated: "I am a Communist and my painting is Communist painting. ... But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in a special way to show my politics."^[76] His commitment to communism, common among continental intellectuals and artists at the time, has long been the subject of some controversy; a notable demonstration thereof was a quote by Salvador Dalí (with whom Picasso had a rather strained relationship^[77]):

Picasso es pintor, yo también; ... Picasso es español, yo también; Picasso es comunista, yo tampoco.

(Picasso is a painter, so am I; ... Picasso is a Spaniard, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.)^[78][79][80]

In the late 1940s, his old friend the surrealist poet, Trotskyist,^[81] and anti-Stalinist André Breton was more blunt; refusing to shake hands with Picasso, he told him: "I don't approve of your joining the Communist Party nor with the stand you have taken concerning the purges of the intellectuals after the Liberation."^[82] As a communist, Picasso opposed the intervention of the United Nations and the United States in the Korean War, and depicted it in Massacre in Korea.^[83][84] The art critic Kirsten Hoving Keen wrote that it was "inspired by reports of American atrocities" and considered it one of Picasso's communist works.^[85]

On 9 January 1949, Picasso created Dove, a black and white lithograph. It was used to illustrate a poster at the 1949 World Peace Council and became an iconographic image of the period, known as "The dove of peace". Picasso's image was used around the world as a symbol of the Peace Congresses and communism.^[86]

In 1962, he received the Lenin Peace Prize.^[87] Biographer and art critic John Berger felt his talents as an artist were "wasted" by the communists.^[88] According to Jean Cocteau's diaries, Picasso once said to him in reference to the communists: "I have joined a family, and like all families, it's full of shit."^[89]

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Massacre in Korea

Massacre in Korea

Massacre in Korea is an expressionistic painting completed on 18 January 1951 by Pablo Picasso. It is Picasso's third anti-war painting and depicts a scene of a massacre of a group of naked women and children by a firing squad. It has been considered to be a condemnation of American intervention in the Korean War. The painting was exhibited in the Musée Picasso in Paris.

Catalonia

Catalonia

Catalonia is an autonomous community of Spain, designated as a nationality by its Statute of Autonomy.

Spanish Civil War

Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War was a civil war in Spain fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republicans and the Nationalists. Republicans were loyal to the left-leaning Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic, and consisted of various socialist, communist, separatist, anarchist, and republican parties, some of which had opposed the government in the pre-war period. The opposing Nationalists were an alliance of Falangists, monarchists, conservatives, and traditionalists led by a military junta among whom General Francisco Franco quickly achieved a preponderant role. Due to the international political climate at the time, the war had many facets and was variously viewed as class struggle, a religious struggle, a struggle between dictatorship and republican democracy, between revolution and counterrevolution, and between fascism and communism. According to Claude Bowers, U.S. ambassador to Spain during the war, it was the "dress rehearsal" for World War II. The Nationalists won the war, which ended in early 1939, and ruled Spain until Franco's death in November 1975.

Francisco Franco

Francisco Franco

Francisco Franco Bahamonde was a Spanish military general who led the Nationalist forces in overthrowing the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War and thereafter ruled over Spain from 1939 to 1975 as a dictator, assuming the title Caudillo. This period in Spanish history, from the Nationalist victory to Franco's death, is commonly known as Francoist Spain or as the Francoist dictatorship.

Second Spanish Republic

Second Spanish Republic

The Spanish Republic, commonly known as the Second Spanish Republic, was the form of government in Spain from 1931 to 1939. The Republic was proclaimed on 14 April 1931, after the deposition of King Alfonso XIII, and was dissolved on 1 April 1939 after surrendering in the Spanish Civil War to the Nationalists led by General Francisco Franco.

French Communist Party

French Communist Party

The French Communist Party is a political party in France which advocates the principles of communism. The PCF is a member of the Party of the European Left, and its MEPs sit in the European United Left–Nordic Green Left group.

Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a revolutionary in the Russian Empire and political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (1941–1953). Initially governing the country as part of a collective leadership, he consolidated power to become a dictator by 1928. Ideologically adhering to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, he formalised these ideas as Marxism–Leninism, while his own policies are called Stalinism.

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler was a German-born art collector, and one of the most notable French art dealers of the 20th century. He became prominent as an art gallery owner in Paris beginning in 1907 and was among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and the Cubist movement in art.

Continental Europe

Continental Europe

Continental Europe or mainland Europe is the contiguous continent of Europe, excluding its surrounding islands. It can also be referred to ambiguously as the European continent, – which can conversely mean the whole of Europe – and, by some, simply as the Continent. When Eurasia is regarded as a single continent, Europe is treated as a subcontinent, and called as European subcontinent.

Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquess of Dalí of Púbol, known as Salvador Dalí, was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in his work.

André Breton

André Breton

André Robert Breton was a French writer and poet, the co-founder, leader, and principal theorist of surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism".

Korean War

Korean War

The Korean War was fought between North Korea and South Korea from 1950 to 1953. The war began on 25 June 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea following clashes along the border and rebellions in South Korea. North Korea was supported by China and the Soviet Union while South Korea was supported by the United States and allied countries. The fighting ended with an armistice on 27 July 1953.

Pablo Picasso, 1901, Old Woman (Woman with Gloves), oil on cardboard, 67 × 52.1 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Pablo Picasso, 1901–02, Femme au café (Absinthe Drinker), oil on canvas, 73 × 54 cm, Hermitage Museum

Picasso was exceptionally prolific throughout his long lifetime. At his death there were more than 45,000 unsold works in his estate, comprising 1,885 paintings, 1,228 sculptures, 3,222 ceramics, 7,089 drawings, 150 sketchbooks, many thousands of prints, and numerous tapestries and rugs.^[90] The most complete – but not exhaustive – catalogue of his works, the catalogue raisonné compiled by Christian Zervos, lists more than 16,000 paintings and drawings.^[91] Picasso's output was several times more prolific than most artists of his era; by at least one account, American artist Bob Ross is the only one to rival Picasso's volume, and Ross's artwork was designed specifically to be easily mass-produced quickly.^[92]

The medium in which Picasso made his most important contribution was painting.^[93] In his paintings, Picasso used colour as an expressive element, but relied on drawing rather than subtleties of colour to create form and space.^[93] He sometimes added sand to his paint to vary its texture. A nanoprobe of Picasso's The Red Armchair (1931), in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, by physicists at Argonne National Laboratory in 2012 confirmed art historians' belief that Picasso used common house paint in many of his paintings.^[94][95] Much of his painting was done at night by artificial light.

Picasso's early sculptures were carved from wood or modelled in wax or clay, but from 1909 to 1928 Picasso abandoned modelling and instead made sculptural constructions using diverse materials.^[93] An example is Guitar (1912), a relief construction made of sheet metal and wire that Jane Fluegel terms a "three-dimensional planar counterpart of Cubist painting" that marks a "revolutionary departure from the traditional approaches, modeling and carving".^[96]

Pablo Picasso, 1921, Nous autres musiciens (Three Musicians), oil on canvas, 204.5 x 188.3 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

From the beginning of his career, Picasso displayed an interest in subject matter of every kind,^[97] and demonstrated a great stylistic versatility that enabled him to work in several styles at once. For example, his paintings of 1917 included the pointillist Woman with a Mantilla, the Cubist Figure in an Armchair, and the naturalistic Harlequin (all in the Museu Picasso, Barcelona). In 1919, he made a number of drawings from postcards and photographs that reflect his interest in the stylistic conventions and static character of posed photographs.^[98] In 1921 he simultaneously painted several large neoclassical paintings and two versions of the Cubist composition Three Musicians (Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art).^[49] In an interview published in 1923, Picasso said, "The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting ... If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression I have never hesitated to adopt them."^[49]

Although his Cubist works approach abstraction, Picasso never relinquished the objects of the real world as subject matter. Prominent in his Cubist paintings are forms easily recognized as guitars, violins, and bottles.^[99] When Picasso depicted complex narrative scenes it was usually in prints, drawings, and small-scale works; Guernica (1937) is one of his few large narrative paintings.^[98]

Picasso painted mostly from imagination or memory. According to William Rubin, Picasso "could only make great art from subjects that truly involved him ... Unlike Matisse, Picasso had eschewed models virtually all his mature life, preferring to paint individuals whose lives had both impinged on, and had real significance for, his own."^[100] The art critic Arthur Danto said Picasso's work constitutes a "vast pictorial autobiography" that provides some basis for the popular conception that "Picasso invented a new style each time he fell in love with a new woman".^[100] The autobiographical nature of Picasso's art is reinforced by his habit of dating his works, often to the day. He explained: "I want to leave to posterity a documentation that will be as complete as possible. That's why I put a date on everything I do."^[100]

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Philadelphia Museum of Art

Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at Eakins Oval. The museum administers collections containing over 240,000 objects including major holdings of European, American and Asian origin. The various classes of artwork include sculpture, paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, armor, and decorative arts.

Hermitage Museum

Hermitage Museum

The State Hermitage Museum is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It is the second largest art museum in the world by gallery space. It was founded in 1764 when Empress Catherine the Great acquired an impressive collection of paintings from the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. The museum celebrates the anniversary of its founding each year on 7 December, Saint Catherine's Day. It has been open to the public since 1852. The Art Newspaper ranked the museum 6th in their list of the most visited art museums, with 1,649,443 visitors in 2021.

Catalogue raisonné

Catalogue raisonné

A catalogue raisonné is a comprehensive, annotated listing of all the known artworks by an artist either in a particular medium or all media. The works are described in such a way that they may be reliably identified by third parties, and such listings play an important role in authentification.

Christian Zervos

Christian Zervos

Christian Zervos was a Greek-French art historian, critic, collector, writer and publisher.

Bob Ross

Bob Ross

Robert Norman Ross was an American painter, art instructor, and television host. He was the creator and host of The Joy of Painting, an instructional television program that aired from 1983 to 1994 on PBS in the United States, CBC in Canada, and similar channels in Latin America, Europe and elsewhere. Ross would subsequently become widely known through his posthumous internet presence.

Nanoprobe (device)

Nanoprobe (device)

A nanoprobe is an optical device developed by tapering an optical fiber to a tip measuring 100 nm = 1000 angstroms wide. Also, a very thin coating of silver nanoparticles helps to enhance the Raman scattering effect of the light. The reflected light demonstrates vibration energies unique to each object, which can be characterised and identified. The silver nanoparticles in this technique provides for the rapid oscillations of electrons, adding to vibration energies, and thus enhancing Raman Scattering—commonly known as surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). These SERS nanoprobes produce higher electromagnetic fields enabling higher signal output—eventually resulting in accurate detection and analysis of samples.

Art Institute of Chicago

Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago's Grant Park, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the world. Recognized for its curatorial efforts and popularity among visitors, the museum hosts approximately 1.5 million people annually. Its collection, stewarded by 11 curatorial departments, is encyclopedic, and includes iconic works such as Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Pablo Picasso's The Old Guitarist, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, and Grant Wood's American Gothic. Its permanent collection of nearly 300,000 works of art is augmented by more than 30 special exhibitions mounted yearly that illuminate aspects of the collection and present cutting-edge curatorial and scientific research.

Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne National Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center in Lemont, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1946, the laboratory is now sponsored by the United States Department of Energy and administered by UChicago Argonne LLC of the University of Chicago. The facility is the largest national laboratory by size and scope in the Midwest.

Museu Picasso

Museu Picasso

The Museu Picasso is an art museum in Barcelona, in Catalonia, Spain. It houses an extensive collection of artworks by the twentieth-century Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, with a total of 4251 of his works. It is housed in five adjoining medieval palaces on Montcada Street in the La Ribera neighborhood in the Old City of Barcelona. It opened to the public on 9 March 1963, becoming the first museum dedicated to Picasso's work and the only one created during his lifetime. It has since been declared a museum of national interest by the Government of Catalonia.

Three Musicians

Three Musicians

Three Musicians is the title of two similar oil paintings by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. They were both completed in 1921 in Fontainebleau near Paris, France, and exemplify the Synthetic Cubist style; the flat planes of color and "intricate puzzle-like composition" giving the appearance of cutout paper with which the style originated. These paintings each colorfully represent three musicians wearing masks. Two of the musicians are wearing costumes of the popular Italian theater Commedia dell'arte.

William Rubin

William Rubin

William Stanley Rubin was an American art scholar, a distinguished curator, critic, collector, art historian and teacher of modern art.

Arthur Danto

Arthur Danto

Arthur Coleman Danto was an American art critic, philosopher, and professor at Columbia University. He was best known for having been a long-time art critic for The Nation and for his work in philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of history, though he contributed significantly to a number of fields, including the philosophy of action. His interests included thought, feeling, philosophy of art, theories of representation, philosophical psychology, Hegel's aesthetics, and the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Postage stamp, USSR, 1973. Picasso has been honoured on stamps worldwide.

Picasso's influence was and remains immense and widely acknowledged by his admirers and detractors alike. On the occasion of his 1939 retrospective at MoMA, Life magazine wrote: "During the 25 years he has dominated modern European art, his enemies say he has been a corrupting influence. With equal violence, his friends say he is the greatest artist alive."^[101] Picasso was the first artist to receive a special honour exhibition at the Grand Gallery of the Louvre Museum in Paris in celebration of his 90 years.^[102] In 1998, Robert Hughes wrote of him: "To say that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace. ... No painter or sculptor, not even Michelangelo, had been as famous as this in his own lifetime. ... Though Marcel Duchamp, that cunning old fox of conceptual irony, has certainly had more influence on nominally vanguard art over the past 30 years than Picasso, the Spaniard was the last great beneficiary of the belief that the language of painting and sculpture really mattered to people other than their devotees."^[103]

Musée Picasso, Paris (Hotel Salé, 1659)

At the time of Picasso's death many of his paintings were in his possession, as he had kept off the art market what he did not need to sell. In addition, Picasso had a considerable collection of the work of other famous artists, some his contemporaries, such as Henri Matisse, with whom he had exchanged works. Since Picasso left no will, his death duties (estate tax) to the French state were paid in the form of his works and others from his collection. These works form the core of the immense and representative collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris. In 2003, relatives of Picasso inaugurated a museum dedicated to him in his birthplace, Málaga, Spain, the Museo Picasso Málaga.

Museu Picasso is located in the gothic palaces of Montcada street in Barcelona

The Museu Picasso in Barcelona features many of his early works, created while he was living in Spain, including many rarely seen works which reveal his firm grounding in classical techniques. The museum also holds many precise and detailed figure studies done in his youth under his father's tutelage, as well as the extensive collection of Jaime Sabartés, his close friend and personal secretary.

Guernica was on display in New York's Museum of Modern Art for many years. In 1981, it was returned to Spain and was on exhibit at the Casón del Buen Retiro of the Museo del Prado. In 1992, the painting was put on display in the Reina Sofía Museum when it opened.

Picasso Museum in Buitrago

In 1985, a museum was established in Buitrago del Lozoya by Picasso's friend Eugenio Arias Herranz.^[104]

It was announced on 22 September 2020 that the project for a new Picasso Museum due to open in Aix-en-Provence in 2021, in a former convent (Couvent des Prêcheurs), which would have held the largest collection of his paintings of any museum, had been scrapped due to the fact that Catherine Hutin-Blay, Jacqueline Picasso's daughter, and the City Council had failed to reach an agreement.^[105]

In the 1996 movie Surviving Picasso, Picasso is portrayed by actor Anthony Hopkins.^[106] Picasso is also a character in Steve Martin's 1993 play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile. In A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway tells Gertrude Stein that he would like to have some Picassos, but cannot afford them. Later in the book, Hemingway mentions looking at one of Picasso's paintings. He refers to it as Picasso's nude of the girl with the basket of flowers, possibly related to Young Naked Girl with Flower Basket. On 8 October 2010, Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris, an exhibition of 150 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and photographs from the Musée National Picasso in Paris, opened at the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, US. The exhibition subsequently travelled to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia: the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, California, US.;^[107] the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;^[108] and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

As of 2015^[update], Picasso remained the top-ranked artist (based on sales of his works at auctions) according to the Art Market Trends report.^[109] More of his paintings have been stolen than any other artist's;^[110] in 2012, the Art Loss Register had 1,147 of his works listed as stolen.^[111] The Picasso Administration functions as his official Estate. The US copyright representative for the Picasso Administration is the Artists Rights Society.^[112]

Picasso is played by Antonio Banderas in the 2018 season of Genius which focuses on his life and art.

The Basel vote

The Kunstmuseum Basel

In the 1940s, a Swiss insurance company based in Basel had bought two paintings by Picasso to diversify its investments and serve as a guarantee for the insured risks. Following an air disaster in 1967, the company had to pay out heavy reimbursements. The company decided to part with the two paintings, which were deposited in the Kunstmuseum Basel. In 1968, a large number of Basel citizens called for a local referendum on the purchase of the Picassos by the Canton of Basel-Stadt, which was successful, making it the first time in democratic history that the population of a city voted on the purchase of works of art for a public art museum.^[113] The paintings therefore remained in the museum in Basel. Informed of this, Picasso donated three paintings and a sketch to the city and its museum and was later made an honorary citizen by the city.^[114]

Auction history

Pablo Picasso, 1905, Garçon à la pipe, (Boy with a Pipe), private collection, Rose Period

Several paintings by Picasso rank among the most expensive paintings in the world. Garçon à la pipe sold for US$104 million at Sotheby's on 4 May 2004, establishing a new price record. Dora Maar au Chat sold for US$95.2 million at Sotheby's on 3 May 2006.^[115] On 4 May 2010, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust was sold at Christie's for $106.5 million. The 1932 work, which depicts Picasso's mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter reclining and as a bust, was in the personal collection of Los Angeles philanthropist Frances Lasker Brody, who died in November 2009.^[116] On 11 May 2015 his painting Women of Algiers set the record for the highest price ever paid for a painting when it sold for US$179.3 million at Christie's in New York.^[117]

On 21 June 2016, a painting by Pablo Picasso titled Femme Assise (1909) sold for £43.2 million ($63.4 million) at Sotheby's London, exceeding the estimate by nearly $20 million, setting a world record for the highest price ever paid at auction for a Cubist work.^[118][119]

On 17 May 2017, The Jerusalem Post in an article titled "Picasso Work Stolen By Nazis Sells for $45 Million at Auction" reported the sale of a portrait painted by Picasso, the 1939 Femme assise, robe bleu, which was previously misappropriated during the early years of WWII. The painting has changed hands several times since its recovery, most recently through auction in May 2017 at Christie's in New York City.^[120]

In March 2018, his Femme au Béret et à la Robe Quadrillée (1937), a portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter, sold for £49.8m at Sotheby's in London.^[121]

Discover more about Artistic legacy related topics

Louvre

Louvre

The Louvre, or the Louvre Museum, is the world's most-visited museum, and a historic landmark in Paris, France. It is the home of some of the best-known works of art, including the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. A central landmark of the city, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the city's 1st arrondissement. At any given point in time, approximately 38,000 objects from prehistory to the 21st century are being exhibited over an area of 72,735 square meters. Attendance in 2022 was 7.8 million visitors, up 170 percent from 2021, but still below the 10.8 million visitors in 2018 before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. He has had an immense impact on 20th- and 21st-century art, and a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By the time of World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as "retinal", intended only to please the eye. Instead, he wanted to use art to serve the mind.

Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

Museo Picasso Málaga

Museo Picasso Málaga

The Museo Picasso Málaga is a museum in Málaga, Andalusia, Spain, the city where artist Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born. It opened in 2003 in the Buenavista Palace, and has 285 works donated by members of Picasso's family. In 2009, the Fundación Paul, Christine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso that owned the collection merged with the Fundación Museo Picasso Málaga that operated the museum, which is based in the home on Málaga's Plaza de la Merced that was Picasso's birthplace, and is now the Museo Casa Natal. The new merged foundation is the "Fundación Museo Picasso Málaga. Legado Paul, Christine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso".

Catalan Gothic

Catalan Gothic

Catalan Gothic is an artistic style, with particular characteristics in the field of architecture. It occurred in the Principality of Catalonia within the Crown of Aragon between the 13th and 15th centuries, which places it at the end of the European Gothic period and at the beginning of the Renaissance. The term Catalan Gothic is confined to Barcelona and its area of influence, which has its own characteristics.

Barcelona

Barcelona

Barcelona is a city on the coast of northeastern Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within city limits, its urban area extends to numerous neighbouring municipalities within the Province of Barcelona and is home to around 4.8 million people, making it the fifth most populous urban area in the European Union after Paris, the Ruhr area, Madrid, and Milan. It is one of the largest metropolises on the Mediterranean Sea, located on the coast between the mouths of the rivers Llobregat and Besòs, and bounded to the west by the Serra de Collserola mountain range.

Casón del Buen Retiro

Casón del Buen Retiro

The Casón del Buen Retiro is an annex of the Museo del Prado complex in Madrid. Following major restoration work, which was completed in October 2007, it now houses the Museum's study centre and library.

Museo del Prado

Museo del Prado

The Prado Museum, officially known as Museo Nacional del Prado, is the main Spanish national art museum, located in central Madrid. It is widely considered to house one of the world's finest collections of European art, dating from the 12th century to the early 20th century, based on the former Spanish royal collection, and the single best collection of Spanish art. Founded as a museum of paintings and sculpture in 1819, it also contains important collections of other types of works. The Prado Museum is one of the most visited sites in the world and is considered one of the greatest art museums in the world. The numerous works by Francisco Goya, the single most extensively represented artist, as well as by Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, and Diego Velázquez, are some of the highlights of the collection. Velázquez and his keen eye and sensibility were also responsible for bringing much of the museum's fine collection of Italian masters to Spain, now one of the largest outside Italy.

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is Spain's national museum of 20th-century art. The museum was officially inaugurated on September 10, 1992, and is named for Queen Sofía. It is located in Madrid, near the Atocha train and metro stations, at the southern end of the so-called Golden Triangle of Art.

Buitrago del Lozoya

Buitrago del Lozoya

Buitrago del Lozoya is a municipality of the autonomous community of Madrid in central Spain. It belongs to the comarca of Sierra Norte. The town is one of the few in the community that have maintained its walls, which are of Moorish origin and have been restored in the 15th century. It lies on a peninsula surrounded by the Lozoya river.

Aix-en-Provence

Aix-en-Provence

Aix-en-Provence, or simply Aix, is a city and commune in southern France, about 30 km (20 mi) north of Marseille. A former capital of Provence, it is the subprefecture of the arrondissement of Aix-en-Provence, in the department of Bouches-du-Rhône, in the region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. The population of Aix-en-Provence is approximately 145,000. Its inhabitants are called Aixois or, less commonly, Aquisextains.

Anthony Hopkins

Anthony Hopkins

Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins is a Welsh actor, director, and producer. One of Britain's most recognisable and prolific actors, he is known for his performances on the screen and stage. Hopkins has received many awards and nominations during his career, including two Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and an Olivier Award. He has also received the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2005 and the BAFTA Fellowship for lifetime achievement in 2008. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to drama in 1993.

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Throughout his life Picasso maintained several mistresses in addition to his wife or primary partner. Picasso was married twice and had four children by three women:

• Paulo (4 February 1921 – 5 June 1975, Paul Joseph Picasso) – with Olga Khokhlova
• Maya (5 September 1935 – 20 December 2022, Maria de la Concepcion Picasso) – with Marie-Thérèse Walter
• Claude (born 15 May 1947, Claude Pierre Pablo Picasso) – with Françoise Gilot
• Paloma (born 19 April 1949, Anne Paloma Picasso) – with Françoise Gilot

Photographer and painter Dora Maar was also a constant companion and lover of Picasso. The two were closest in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and it was Maar who documented the painting of Guernica.

The women in Picasso's life played an important role in the emotional and erotic aspects of his creative expression, and the tumultuous nature of these relationships has been considered vital to his artistic process. Many of these women functioned as muses for him, and their inclusion in his extensive oeuvre granted them a place in art history.^[122] A largely recurring motif in his body of work is the female form. The variations in his relationships informed and collided with his progression of style throughout his career. For example, portraits created of his first wife, Olga, were rendered in a naturalistic style during his Neoclassical period. His relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter inspired many of his surrealist pieces, as well as what is referred to as his "Year of Wonders".^[123] Reappearance of acrobats theme in 1905 put an end to his "Blue Period" and transitioned into his "Rose Period". This transition has been incorrectly attributed to the presence of Fernande Olivier in his life.^[124]: 75

Picasso has been commonly characterised as a womaniser and a misogynist, being quoted as having said to one of his mistresses, Françoise Gilot, "Women are machines for suffering."^[125] He later told her, "For me there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats."^[126] In her memoir, Picasso, My Grandfather, Marina Picasso writes of his treatment of women, "He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them."^[127]

Of the several important women in his life, two, Marie-Thèrése Walter, a mistress, and Jacqueline Roque, his second wife, died by suicide. Others, notably his first wife Olga Khokhlova, and his mistress Dora Maar, succumbed to nervous breakdowns. His son, Paulo, developed a fatal alcoholism due to depression. His grandson, Pablito, also died by suicide that same year by ingesting bleach when he was barred by Jacqueline Roque from attending the artist's funeral.^[125]

Discover more about Personal life related topics

Olga Khokhlova

Olga Khokhlova

Olga Picasso was a ballet dancer in the Russian ballet. She was also the first wife of Pablo Picasso, one of his early artistic muses and the mother of his son, Paulo.

Maya Widmaier-Picasso

Maya Widmaier-Picasso

María de la Concepción "Maya" Widmaier-Picasso, later known as Maya Ruiz-Picasso, was the eldest daughter of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter. She devoted part of her life to the study and preservation of the legacy of her father.

Marie-Thérèse Walter

Marie-Thérèse Walter

Marie-Thérèse Walter was a French model and lover of Pablo Picasso from 1927 to about 1935 and the mother of their daughter Maya Widmaier-Picasso. Their relationship began when she was seventeen years old; he was 45 and married to his first wife, Olga Khokhlova. It ended after Picasso moved on to his next relationship, with artist Dora Maar. Walter is known as Picasso's "golden muse" and inspired numerous artworks and sculptures that he created of her during their relationship.

Claude Picasso

Claude Picasso

Claude Ruiz Picasso is a French photographer, cinematographer, movie director, visual artist, graphic designer, and businessman. He is a child of Françoise Gilot and Pablo Picasso and the older brother of Paloma Picasso. By a wish on Gilot's part, he was named after Claude Gillot, a pioneering French Rococo artist and mentor to fellow artist Jean-Antoine Watteau. His name was Claude Gilot until age 12. In 1968 he met Sara Lavner (Schultz), a young woman from Brooklyn. Sara and Claude married in 1969 and divorced in 1972. He was a photographer in New York City when his father died. At the time, he had experienced a period of estrangement from his father due to his mother's 1964 memoir Life with Picasso. His father's legacy nevertheless proved important to him and he established the "Picasso Administration" to look after copyright and other legal matters.

Françoise Gilot

Françoise Gilot

Marie Françoise Gilot is a French painter, best known for her relationship with Pablo Picasso, with whom she had two children. Gilot was already launched as an accomplished artist, notably in watercolours and ceramics, but her professional career was eclipsed by her social celebrity, and when she split from Picasso, he discouraged galleries from buying her work, as well as unsuccessfully trying to block her 1964 memoir, Life with Picasso.

Paloma Picasso

Paloma Picasso

Paloma Picasso is a French and Spanish fashion designer and businesswoman, best known for her jewelry designs for Tiffany & Co, and her signature perfumes. She is the daughter of artist Pablo Picasso and painter Françoise Gilot.

Dora Maar

Dora Maar

Henriette Theodora Markovitch, known as Dora Maar, was a French photographer, painter, and poet. A romantic partner of Pablo Picasso, Maar was depicted in a number of Picasso's paintings, including his Portrait of Dora Maar and Dora Maar au Chat.

Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism was a Western cultural movement in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that drew inspiration from the art and culture of classical antiquity. Neoclassicism was born in Rome largely thanks to the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, at the time of the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, but its popularity spread all over Europe as a generation of European art students finished their Grand Tour and returned from Italy to their home countries with newly rediscovered Greco-Roman ideals. The main Neoclassical movement coincided with the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, and continued into the early 19th century, laterally competing with Romanticism. In architecture, the style continued throughout the 19th, 20th and up to the 21st century.

Picasso's Blue Period

Picasso's Blue Period

The Blue Period is a term used to define the works produced by Spanish painter Pablo Picasso between 1901 and 1904 when he painted essentially monochromatic paintings in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colors. These somber works, inspired by Spain and painted in Barcelona and Paris, are now some of his most popular works, although he had difficulty selling them at the time.

Fernande Olivier

Fernande Olivier

Fernande Olivier was a French artist and model known primarily for having been the model and first muse of painter Pablo Picasso, and for her written accounts of her relationship with him. Picasso painted over 60 portraits of Olivier.

Marina Picasso

Marina Picasso

Marina Picasso is the granddaughter of Pablo Picasso. She inherited a fifth of her grandfather's estate and has used much of the inheritance to fund humanitarian efforts for children in need. She has five children and lives in Geneva, Switzerland and Cannes, France.

Jacqueline Roque

Jacqueline Roque

Jacqueline Picasso or Jacqueline Roque was the muse and second wife of Pablo Picasso. Their marriage lasted 12 years until his death, during which time he created over 400 portraits of her, more than any of Picasso's other lovers.

Picasso entrusted Christian Zervos to constitute the catalogue raisonné of his work (painted and drawn). The first volume of the catalogue, Works from 1895 to 1906, published in 1932, entailed the financial ruin of Zervos, self-publishing under the name Cahiers d'art, forcing him to sell part of his art collection at auction to avoid bankruptcy.^[128][129]

From 1932 to 1978, Zervos constituted the catalogue raisonné of the complete works of Picasso in the company of the artist who had become one of his friends in 1924. Following the death of Zervos, Mila Gagarin supervised the publication of 11 additional volumes from 1970 to 1978.^[130]

The 33 volumes cover the entire work from 1895 to 1972, with close to 16,000 black and white photographs, in accord with the will of the artist.^[131]

• 1932: tome I, Œuvres de 1895 à 1906. Introduction p. XI–[XXXXIX], 185 pages, 384 reproductions
• 1942: tome II, vol.1, Œuvres de 1906 à 1912. Introduction p. XI–[LV], 172 pages, 360 reproductions
• 1944: tome II, vol.2, Œuvres de 1912 à 1917. Introduction p. IX–[LXX–VIII], 233 p. pp. 173 to 406, 604 reproductions
• 1949: tome III, Œuvres de 1917 à 1919. Introduction p. IX–[XIII], 152 pages, 465 reproductions
• 1951: tome IV, Œuvres de 1920 à 1922. Introduction p. VII–[XIV], 192 pages, 455 reproductions
• 1952: tome V, Œuvres de 1923 à 1925. Introduction p. IX–[XIV], 188 pages, 466 reproductions
• 1954: tome VI, Supplément aux tomes I à V. Sans introduction, 176 pages, 1481 reproductions
• 1955: tome VII, Œuvres de 1926 à 1932. Introduction p. V–[VII], 184 pages, 424 reproductions

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• 1978: Catalogue raisonné des œuvres de Pablo Picasso, Paris, Éditions Cahiers d'art^[132]

Further publications by Zervos

• Picasso. Œuvres de 1920 à 1926, Cahiers d'art, Paris
• Dessins de Picasso 1892–1948, Paris, Éditions Cahiers d'art, 1949
• Picasso. Dessins (1892–1948), Hazan, 199 reproductions, 1949