(1881-1973)

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   Pablo Ruiz y Picasso was born in Malaga, in 1881, the son of José Ruiz y Blasco and his wife Maria Picasso y Lopez. His father was a painter, teacher and curator of the local museum. The family was not wealthy, especially since on marriage, Don José had to provide for his mother-in-law and two unmarried sisters-in-law as well as his wife and (later) two children.

    In 1891 the family moved to La Coruna in Galicia, where Don José got a job teaching art.

    Picasso was educated at St Raphael's school, but he didn't learn very much. In 1892, he matriculated from the School of Fine Arts and continued with his studies at the Instituto da Guarda. When the family moved to Barcelona, Picasso studied at the Llotja and from 1897 at the Madrid Academy.
Although Picasso's father taught him to draw and paint and gave him money to continue his studies in Paris, for some reason Picasso turned against him, dropping his father's surname and retaining his mother's. When his father died, Picasso did not go to the funeral.

    From 1901-4, he painted in blue tones to depict poverty and suffering (his "blue period"), then in 1904 he went to Paris, settling in Montmartre, and began painting in a less austere style (his "rose period").

    From 1907, he began to work on the simplification of form and shocked people with his distortion of the human form in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which provided a turning point in European art. From now on, Picasso developed the Cubist movement, together with Georges Braque.

    In l917, Picasso designed the set and costumes for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The audience disliked his Cubist sets for Parade. Picasso met the ballerina Olga Koklova and married her in 1918. They had one son. By 1935, he had left Olga for Maria-Theresa Walter, who bore him a daughter.

    Images of violence and anguish increasingly appeared in his work from 1928, culminating in his masterpiece Guernica (1937). The painting expressed his horror of fascist brutality in one incident in the Spanish Civil War. Picasso never returned to Spain. Franco's government was later to request that the painting should be hung in the Madrid Museum of Modern Art, but Picasso specified that it should only go to Spain when the fascist government had fallen.

    In 1939, Picasso had his most important exhibition in New York, entitled: "Picasso: Forty years of his Life", which contained 344 pieces of his work.

    In 1940, the Germans entered Paris. Picasso stayed, although he had taken a public stance against fascism and was distrusted because of his communist friends. He was forbidden to exhibit his work.

    After the Liberation, he joined the Communist Party. He lived with Françoise Gilot until 1953, when she left him, taking their two children with her. In 1961, when he was in his eighties, he married his 35-year-old model, Jacqueline Roche.

    He continued to produce work, including a series of etchings, until his death in 1973, at his home in France.

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