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Pablo Diego José Ruiz Picasso was born on October 25, 1881 in Malaga. He was the son of a Basque painter named José Ruiz Blasco and his wife, María Picasso.

During his childhood, his family had many financial difficulties, so in 1895 they moved to Barcelona where his father obtained a teaching position at the Escola d’Arts y Oficis de la Llotja de Barcelona.

Pablo Picasso, who had already excelled in painting from a very young age and received commissions from highly influential people, manages to be admitted to school by solving exercises that others took a month to complete in one day. At the age of fifteen, he already had a workshop on Calle de la Plata in Barcelona and his success grew.

In 1900 he traveled to Paris to visit the World's Fair, where he sold some of his drawings to Petrus Mañach, who offered him 150 francs a month for his works. He thus became a professional artist and decided to move to Paris for good.

As a young man, Picasso always painted works with absolute academic realism, he tried to portray reality as he saw it and his parents helped him by posing as models for his paintings and portraits. All this changed when he moved to Paris, where he adopted and developed the pictorial movement of 'Cubism'. Thanks to this new style, he abandoned the realism of his paintings and began to change the shape and colors of the objects he painted. He developed it to such an extent that it began to become a very abstract style.

He exhibited his paintings in some exhibitions in London and Barcelona, ​​and his new style was both criticized and admired among the public. During the year 1914 the war brought misfortunes. He supported the Republican side and accepted during that period to be the director of the Prado Museum. In 1944 he joined the French Communist Party and also grew tired of painting, so he began to make prints, engravings, and sculptures that were as successful as his paintings. In 1957 he fell in love with Jacqueline Roqué, with whom he remained until he died in 1973. Picasso went through various stages as his painting evolved. His first stage was realism, where he captured the reality he saw in his works. The next was the ‘blue stage’, where he only used blue colors for his works. His most famous works are: ‘Guernica’ or ‘The young ladies of Avignon’.

 

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