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SELF PORTRAIT AT 25 YEARS OLD (1907)

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Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born on October 26, 1881, in Malaga, Spain. He was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, for both his artwork and his actions in activism.

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Pablo Picasso was an innovative artist that had a significant influence on 20th-century art. The adept artist was a master painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramics artist and more. His styles include Cubism and Surrealism, and he is often considered one of the most famous artists of the century.

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Painted in June of 1937 (Original painting is black and white)

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Picasso painted this oil painting to convey the negative effects of war by recreating a real event. Guernica was a city that the Nazis bombed during the Spanish Civil War. It caused some controversy, since it was made for a political reason instead of an artistic one. Spain was also allied with the Nazis, so some people lost respect for Picasso.

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He joined the French Communist Party in 1944 during his time living in France and remained a member until his death, believing that it would fight against the spread of fascism and promote social justice.

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The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

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Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) | Essay | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

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[Pablo Picasso’s] prolific output includes over 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, theater sets and costumes that convey myriad intellectual, political, social, and amorous messages. His creative styles transcend realism and abstraction, Cubism, Neoclassicism, Surrealism, and Expressionism.

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1. He loved animals, and they inspired a lot of his artwork

2. He was a celebrity in his own lifetime, unlike most activists

3. He was a fast paced painter, and usually finished a piece in only a day

4. He has more artwork stolen than any other artist

5. He produced over 150,000 pieces

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As one of history's most famous artists, here are some facts about Picasso worth knowing!

Paris has captured artists' imaginations for centuries and the celebratory Picasso Museum continues to inspire creatives to this day. Before you peruse their stunning collection, here are some interesting Pablo Picasso facts to help you enrich your cultural experience.

While Pablo Picasso is best known by his last name, his full name is 25 words long

At his baptism, Picasso was christened Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso. His incredibly long name is a mixture of his relative's names as well as saints, and Ruiz comes from his father's name, whereas Picasso stems from his mother's.

When Picasso was born, nurses thought he was stillborn

After complications in labour, Picasso (who was extremely small for a child) was believed to be stillborn and left on a side table while medical staff tended to his mother. It was only when his uncle, who was a doctor, blew cigar smoke and he began crying that they realised the mistake and his uncle saved his life.

Picasso's first word was 'lapiz', which is Spanish for pencil

With a father who also worked as a painter, it was expected that art would be in Picasso's blood and his first word merely proved that fact. His father, who specialised in naturalistic paintings of birds, began teaching him to create artistic works from the age of 7 decided that he would give up painting when Picasso turned 14 - claiming that his son had become a better painter than him.

Police thought Picasso had stolen the Mona Lisa

The international art world had one of its biggest scandals in 1911 - the Mona Lisa was stolen from The Louvre. When the police began asking the public for tips, one of the former thieves singled out French literary figure Guillaume Apollinaire whom he had apparently sold stolen work to.

Apollinaire then claimed that his good friend Picasso was responsible for stealing the Mona Lisa and Picasso was detained as a suspect. Da Vinci's masterpiece was later found a couple of years later stolen by a former Louvre security guard during a deal gone awry.

Ironically, Picasso has had more works of art stolen than any other artist

According to the Art Loss Register, over a thousand works of Picasso's have been listed as lost, stolen or disputed. They even continue to be stolen to this day, with a speight of robberies happening between 2010-2012.

Picasso was known for his love affairs

Among all of his interesting facts it's no secret that Picasso has had a string of romantic entanglements with a number of women throughout his life, with four children fathered by three different women.

While he was legally married to Olga Khokhlova for a while, they separated after a few years and as divorce was a costly process they remained married until she passed away in 1955. A number of his works were inspired by his lovers, including Dora Maar and Marie Thérese Walter.

Picasso was a prolific artist and produced over 150,000 works

With collections and museums dedicated to the artist across the world, Picasso's body of work spans 91 years and over 150,000 different works. Divided into different artistic phases of his life including Cubism and the Blue Period, he was incredibly experimental and was constantly evolving as an artist.

Picasso dabbled in other arts, including theatre

Another fun fact is while Picasso is best known for his paintings, towards the latter years of his life he also began to write poetry (he wrote over 300 poems) and a couple of surrealist plays. While they weren't nearly as successful as his other artistic works, one of his plays had a public reading with Albert Camus, Simone de-Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Picasso was a bad student

After Picasso's father felt he had nothing left to teach his son, Picasso moved onto a fine art school when he turned 13. Although he was an incredibly talented artist, his academics suffered as he spent most of his time painting.

Picasso's last words have inspired a Paul McCartney song

At the age of 91 years old, Picasso said at a dinner party in Mougins, "Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can't drink anymore." He died of a heart attack.

Inspired by the artist, Paul McCartney wrote a song literally named Picasso's Last Words (Drink to Me) where artist's final utterance is the foundation of its chorus.

Save on attraction admission

You can use The Paris Pass® to access the fabulous Picasso Museum as well as dozens of other top attractions in Paris. With the pass, you can make huge savings on combined admission vs. paying at the gate. Consider using your pass to pay a visit to the museum dedicated the world-renowned old master.

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Did You Know...? Interesting Facts about Picasso

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As one of history's most famous artists, here are some facts about Picasso worth knowing! Paris has captured artists' imaginations for centuries and the celebratory Picasso Museum continues to inspire creatives to this day. Before you peruse their stunning collection, here are some interesting Pablo Picasso facts to help you enrich your cultural experience.

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Picasso wasn't directly involved in silent or nonviolent protests, but his artwork spoke against cruelty and war, aligning with the idea of peaceful resistance.

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Introduction

Created as an anti-war protest piece in response to the 1937 aerial bombing of a small town in northern Spain, Guernica quickly became one of Pablo Picasso's most-recognized Cubist paintings-and for very good reason. Its monochromatic color palette, intense contrast, and large, violent images are visceral, compelling, and unforgettable even today. . . for those who saw it in 1937, with international tensions running high and World War II looming on the horizon, Guernica struck home like a bolt of lightning.

At the time, Picasso was in his mid-50s and living in France rather than Spain, the land of his birth. As his fame grew, Picasso explored a variety of artistic styles, drawing often from Cubism (which he created with Georges Braque) and the Surrealist movement epitomized by Salvador Dali and his famous "melting clocks" painting.

The genius of Guernica is that it successfully combines dreamlike (some might say nightmarish) elements of Surrealism with the multiple perspectives of Cubism. It was a shocking painting, both for its modern, Cubist style and for its haunting subject matter. After being displayed at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris, Guernica went on a two-year "world tour" to encourage anti-fascist sentiment and raise funds for the troops of the Spanish Republic.

When World War II began in 1939, Guernica left Europe and was sent to New York's Museum of Modern Art for safekeeping. MoMA continued to display the massive painting in various US cities and around the world for almost two decades-helping to turn Picasso and Cubism into household names.

It's hard to say whether the bombing of Guernica would have gained such international attention without Picasso's painting drawing attention to it. Certainly, the bombing was an atrocious act of violence-Guernica was a civilian town, deliberately targeted by the Nazi Luftwaffe on behalf of their ally, General Francisco Franco, who was leading the rebellion against the Spanish Republic.

Yet this type of warfare soon became commonplace-proving that, in its own way, Guernica was nothing short of prophetic: a painting that perfectly encapsulates the inhumanity and horror of modern war, and stands as a timeless warning of what mankind is capable of.

A quick overview of Cubism

To really understand Guernica, it's important to understand how Cubism differs from other art movements. While classical and neoclassical artists try to replicate the world exactly as it appears in real life (or some perfected version of it), Cubists like Picasso were open to depicting the world in more abstract ways that offered new, impossible visions of reality.

At its core, Cubism is a method of painting a person, scene, or object from multiple angles. Picasso and Georges Braque developed this technique and used it to simplify and distill any three-dimensional subject into a multi-faceted, "cubist" shape. Picasso was also greatly influenced by the carved, angular shapes of African masks, an inspiration that can be seen in many of his paintings.

These kinds of Cubist artworks-called Analytic Cubism, to differentiate it from a different, collage-style artwork known as Synthetic Cubism-are typically broken up into geometric segments, occasionally separated by angular lines to form divisions between the various perspectives being shown. While less "geometric" than some of Picasso's earlier Cubist pieces, Guernica's flattened, shifting perspectives and simplified color palette are clear earmarks of the Cubist style.

Ultimately, Picasso-and Guernica- were both incredibly influential in shifting the art world toward modernism and what we now call "abstract art."

Analysis of Guernica

Guernica's primary visual impact comes from its collection of maimed and dying figures, rendered in stark black, white, and gray on a huge canvas. We already know about the event that led Picasso to create this painting (the bombing of Guernica) but he mixed in a lot of symbolism as well, conveying deeper meaning for both himself and the Spanish people.

For our in-depth analysis of Guernica, let's break the painting down into three parts: color and style, symbols, and human figures.

Color and style

Picasso didn't want to distract from his message by including color, so he eventually made it all stark white, black, and gray. Originally, he'd painted a red tear on the woman's face but ultimately decided not to keep it. It makes sense why he did that. . . with no color, there's no relief from what you're seeing, and there's also no unintended (or intended) focal point that way either.

When viewed in person, the entire mural-sized painting hits you all at once, with too many visuals to process. The closer you get to it, the more it engulfs you in the monstrosities of war.

The center of the painting especially is a jumble of angular shapes, cutting across each other with violent energy. Guernica's composition is that of a central triangle of conflict, flanked on the left and right sides by more personal horrors.

The detail above shows a mother weeping for her dead child on the left. On the right, a figure is engulfed in the flames of a burning building (even more chilling for its dispassionate white and black hues).

I find the buildings themselves to be absolutely fascinating too-you might miss them at first glance since they fade into the background behind the screaming figures but the longer you look at Guernica, the more of the stage you'll see.

In one spot, a peaked roof is turned on its side. There a building burns. And all around, empty doorways and windows gape like missing teeth and empty eye socket in the burned-out skull of a city.

While the figures and symbols are a commentary on war in general, and the setting of this painting perfectly represents the town of Guernica, blasted into rubble by the bombs of the Luftwaffe.

Symbols

Placed centrally in the painting, Picasso painted a rearing horse with rolling eyes and distended teeth-its face is so anguished, you can almost hear it scream and you even might miss the spear piercing it from back to front. On the left, a bull seems to guard the mother and child, or perhaps looms over them like the shadow of the war, while in the distant background, barely visible, a bird shrieks at the sky.

While the bull may indeed symbolize war (or perhaps bullfighting, referencing both Spain in particular and the human desire for dominance in general) I believe the suffering horse is a metaphor for the undeserved death that war often brings to the innocent.

Even more telling is the electric bulb casting a harsh light from above, in sharp contrast to the hand-held oil lamp. Picasso placed those two elements right next to each other for a reason:

In a nutshell, he's showing the harsh reality of progress-for all the good that it brings (electricity, automobiles. . . planes) it also brings death and destruction.

The human element

Like the dying horse, the death of the child in its mother's arms symbolizes the suffering of the innocent. And everywhere else in this painting we simply see the atrocities of war. Limbs are huge, swollen, and wounded. Mouths gape in soundless screams, eyes are wide in terror, brows are furrowed in anguish.

A single warrior lies broken and dismembered at the base of the painting, trampled by the death throes of the horse above him. His arm clutches a broken sword, separated from his body. In Guernica we find no solace in humanity-all is death and destruction.

Picasso painted Guernica over the course of just 35 days, a stunning achievement for such a large work, especially one that has made such a mark in history.

Picasso's painting techniques & materials

While Picasso is best known for his modern, abstract paintings, he still learned to draw and paint realistically at a very young age. His own style of painting only began to emerge when he was 19 and living in Paris. It began with his "Blue Period" (quickly followed by his "Rose Period") which was named because of the predominantly blue and pink hues used throughout his paintings at that time.

As Picasso began to experiment more with Cubism, he switched to a limited range of oil paints in muted earth tones. Today's version of Picasso's Cubist color palette would include colors like Burnt Umber and Burnt Sienna, Yellow Ochre, Titanium White, French Ultramarine Blue, and Ivory Black. The artist himself was said to use the Sennelier brand of paints (which had a stiff texture prized by the Impressionists for its ability to make thick daubs on the canvas) and was readily available in Paris at the end of the 19th century.

Read next - How to Add Incredibly Thick Texture to Your Acrylic Paintings

Picasso was also known for finding less "artistic" paints (like those used in industrial applications) and adding them to his palette as well. Other non-art objects were pressed into service too: in Guernica, for example, he added pieces of wallpaper for texture, and at other times he mixed sand into his paint or bits of newspaper.

A typical Cubist painting by Picasso might start out with a Burnt Sienna background and a simple painted outline of his subject. By moving around his subject as he painted, Picasso was able to layer multiple angles and perspectives into a single image.

Picasso famously referenced his constantly-changing style of painting by saying, "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."

How much is Guernica worth today?

Guernica has never been sold at auction, so its value is hard to determine-given its historical ties to Spain, and the worldwide fame of Picasso, it's unlikely that Guernica will ever be sold.

That said, several other paintings by Picasso have sold in recent decades for well over 100 million dollars, so it's easy enough to hypothesize Guernica's value. Given the large size of Guernica (compared to Picasso's other paintings) as well as its historical and cultural significance, its value would probably exceed 200 million dollars if it went up for auction.

Ownership controversy

Picasso intended for the painting to be a gift to the people of Spain, but its ownership has at times been the subject of disagreement. The main reason for this is that in 1937 the Spanish Republic gave Picasso 150,000 French francs to help pay for some of his expenses in creating Guernica (roughly $7,500 or in today's dollars, $135,000).

It's unclear whether Picasso considered Guernica "sold" to the Spanish government, although sources close to the artist say he did NOT consider it a sale. The Spanish government, on the other hand, says that they either acquired it or commissioned it in 1937.

Whoever the owner was at the time, Picasso himself chose to display Guernica at the World's Fair in Paris in 1937, as well as various exhibits around the world before entrusting it to the Museum of Modern Art from 1939 until 1981 (he asked that MoMA keep the painting until Spain was a stable democracy). Accordingly, in 1981 Guernica returned to Spain through an agreement with Picasso's heirs, MoMA, and the Spanish government.

Where is Guernica located?

If you're in Spain, you can see Guernica in person at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. Guernica takes up an entire wall in room 205.10, on the 2nd floor of the Sabatini Building. Admission to the museum costs 12 € and is open on weekdays (except Tuesdays) from 10am to 9pm. The museum also offers reduced hours on Sundays and holidays.

You can also get free admission to Museo Reina Sofia from 7-9pm on weekdays (except Tuesdays) and on Sundays from 12:30 to 2:30pm.

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Guernica by Pablo Picasso - History, Meaning, and Analysis

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A look at the history and meaning of Guernica - Pablo Picasso's most famous cubist painting including analysis, price estimate, and location.

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HOW DOES HE FIT INTO THE CONTEXT OF THE 20TH CENTURY?

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HOW DOES HE FIT INTO THE CONTEXT OF THE 20TH CENTURY?

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Mainly during the Spanish Civil War, happening in the 20th century, his art captured the horrors of everything happening and really made people rethink how they viewed it all.

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died:

April 8, 1973, Mougins, France (aged 91)

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Early years

Pablo Picasso was the son of José Ruiz Blasco, a professor of drawing, and Maria Picasso López. His unusual adeptness for drawing began to manifest itself early, around the age of 10, when he became his father's pupil in A Coruña, where the family moved in 1891. From that point his ability to experiment with what he learned and to develop new expressive means quickly allowed him to surpass his father's abilities. In A Coruña his father shifted his own ambitions to those of his son, providing him with models and support for his first exhibition there at age 13.

The family moved to Barcelona in the autumn of 1895, and Pablo entered the local art academy (La Llotja), where his father had assumed his last post as professor of drawing. The family hoped that their son would achieve success as an academic painter, and in 1897 his eventual fame in Spain seemed assured; in that year his painting Science and Charity, for which his father modeled for the doctor, was awarded an honourable mention in Madrid at the Fine Arts Exhibition.

The Spanish capital was the obvious next stop for the young artist intent on gaining recognition and fulfilling family expectations. Pablo Ruiz duly set off for Madrid in the autumn of 1897 and entered the Royal Academy of San Fernando. But finding the teaching there stupid, he increasingly spent his time recording life around him, in the cafés, on the streets, in the brothels, and in the Prado, where he discovered Spanish painting. He wrote: "The Museum of paintings is beautiful. Velázquez first class; from El Greco some magnificent heads, Murillo does not convince me in every one of his pictures." Works by those and other artists would capture Picasso's imagination at different times during his long career. Goya, for instance, was an artist whose works Picasso copied in the Prado in 1898 (a portrait of the bullfighter Pepe Illo and the drawing for one of the Caprichos, Bien tirada está, which shows a Celestina [procuress] checking a young maja's stockings). Those same characters reappear in his late work-Pepe Illo in a series of engravings (1957) and Celestina as a kind of voyeuristic self-portrait, especially in the series of etchings and engravings known as Suite 347 (1968).

Picasso fell ill in the spring of 1898 and spent most of the remaining year convalescing in the Catalan village of Horta de Ebro in the company of his Barcelona friend Manuel Pallarès. When Picasso returned to Barcelona in early 1899, he was a changed man: he had put on weight; he had learned to live on his own in the open countryside; he spoke Catalan; and, most important, he had made the decision to break with his art-school training and to reject his family's plans for his future. He even began to show a decided preference for his mother's surname, and more often than not he signed his works P.R. Picasso; by late 1901 he had dropped the Ruiz altogether.

In Barcelona Picasso moved among a circle of Catalan artists and writers whose eyes were turned toward Paris. Those were his friends at the café Els Quatre Gats ("The Four Cats," styled after the Chat Noir ["Black Cat"] in Paris), where Picasso had his first Barcelona exhibition in February 1900, and they were the subjects of more than 50 portraits (in mixed media) in the show. In addition, there was a dark, moody "modernista" painting, Last Moments (later painted over), showing the visit of a priest to the bedside of a dying woman, a work that was accepted for the Spanish section of the Exposition Universelle in Paris in that year. Eager to see his own work in place and to experience Paris firsthand, Picasso set off in the company of his studio mate Carles Casagemas ( Portrait of Carles Casagemas [1899]) to conquer, if not Paris, at least a corner of Montmartre.

Discovery of Paris

One of Picasso's principal artistic discoveries on that trip (October-December) was colour-not the drab colours of the Spanish palette, the black of the shawls of Spanish women, or the ochres and browns of the Spanish landscape but brilliant colour-the colour of Vincent van Gogh, of new fashion, of a city celebrating a world's fair. Using charcoal, pastels, watercolours, and oils, Picasso recorded life in the French capital ( Lovers in the Street [1900]). In Moulin de la Galette (1900) he paid tribute to French artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the Swiss Théophile Alexandre Steinlen as well as his Catalan compatriot Ramon Casas.

After just two months Picasso returned to Spain with Casagemas, who had become despondent about a failed love affair. Having tried unsuccessfully to amuse his friend in Málaga, Picasso took off for Madrid, where he worked as an art editor for a new journal, Arte Joven. Casagemas returned to Paris, attempted to shoot the woman he loved, and then turned the gun on himself and died. The impact on Picasso was deep: it was not just that he had lost his loyal friend and perhaps felt a sense of guilt for having abandoned him; more important, he had gained the emotional experience and the material that would stimulate the powerful expressiveness of the works of the so-called Blue Period. Picasso made two death portraits of Casagemas several months later in 1901 as well as two funeral scenes ( Mourners and Evocation), and in 1903 Casagemas appeared as the artist in the enigmatic painting La Vie.

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Pablo Picasso | Biography, Cubism, Famous Paintings, Guernica, & Facts

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Pablo Picasso, Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the most-influential artists of the 20th century and the creator (with Georges Braque) of Cubism. Among his best-known works are Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1909) and Guernica (1937).