Active chiefly in France, he was one of the most inventive and prolific talents in 20th-century art. His Blue Period 1901-04 and Rose Period 1905-06 preceded the revolutionary Les Demoiselles d'Avignon 1907 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), which paved the way for Cubism. In the early 1920s he was considered a leader of the Surrealist movement. In the 1930s his work included metal sculpture, book illustration, and the mural Guernica 1937 (Prado, Madrid), a comment on the bombing of civilians in the Spanish Civil War. He continued to paint into his eighties. Picasso was the son of a painter and drawing master, Jose Ruiz Blasco, using as surname the birth name of his mother, Maria Picasso by Lopez. He began to paint and draw at an early age under his father's tuition, and fraternized with the artists and writers of Barcelona. He first went to Paris 1900 and settled there permanently 1904. To begin with his work was concerned with the social scene, after the fashion of Degas, Forain, and Toulouse-Lautrec, but between 1901 and 1904 he turned to austere figure studies, blue being the dominant colour. Circus pictures followed, delicate and more varied in colour ("rose period", 1905-06). An epoch-making change in his art followed when between 1907 and 1909, together with Georges Braque, he developed Cubism, from the study of Cezanne combined with that of Negro sculpture and primitive art. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, marks the birth of the Cubist movement, to which Picasso adhered until 1914. Like Braque, he practised successively its "analytic" form (construction in depth) and its "synthetic" form (more decorative and two-dimensional in effect). A feature of his Cubist still life, 1912-14, was the use of "collage". He reverted to a Neo-Classical style 1920-24, in painting and in outline etchings of classical themes. He met Diaghilev and designed the décor of a number of ballets 1917-1927. A new and imaginative phase of his art began c. 1925, and coincided with the development of Surrealism. The bull, a traditional Spanish emblem of conflict and tragedy, began to appear in paintings and etchings, and the Guernica, painted 1937 during the Spanish Civil War (New York, Museum of Modern Art), was a fierce pictorial comment on a deplorable bombing incident, making use of this symbolism. Further images of violence and horror produced during and after World War II provoked much criticism. A Surrealistic practice in works after 1938 of combining two different views of a head in the same "double image" often produced a monstrous distortion which also caused protest. In other works, however, a certain humour appears, and Picasso moved freely from one style and one medium to another, using all with astonishing freedom and virtuosity. He practised sculpture, devised metal constructions, designed pottery (from 1946 at Villauris near Antibes) and produced a great number of prints, etchings, aquatints and lithographs. His graphic art is one of his most distinctive achievements, including his illustrations to Ovid and Balzac, his Minotaur etchings, and his aquatints for Buffon's Natural History (published 1942). His prodigious facility was shown in the 180 drawings of artist and model produced 1953-54. His restless energy has been impressively conveyed by a film showing him at work. Picasso has affected the whole course of modern art and no later artist of the School of Paris has rivalled him as an international influence, though the non-figurative art of today has found other sources of inspiration. His paintings are widely distributed in the world's principal public galleries and in many private collections.
