Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born at 23:15 on 25 October 1881 in the city of Málaga, Andalusia, in southern Spain. He was the first child of José Ruiz y Blasco (1838–1913) and María Picasso y López. Picasso's family was of middle-class background. His father was a painter who specialised 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.

Picasso's birth certificate and the record of his baptism include very long names, combining those of various saints and relatives (St. James, St. Joseph, St. Francis of Paola, St. John of Nepomuk, Mary of the Remedies, St. Cyprian, the Holy Trinity, Ruiz, y, Picasso). 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. Pablo's maternal great-grandfather, Tommaso Picasso, moved to Spain around 1807.

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". 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 for 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, though paintings by him exist from later years.

In 1895, Picasso was traumatised when his seven-year-old sister, Conchita, died of diphtheria. 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. Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. …

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 extant records of any major artist's beginnings. 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. 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."

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.

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 sympathising 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. 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. …

Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France, from a heart attack brought on by pulmonary edema. The evening before his death, Picasso and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. He painted until 3 a.m. on this particular night before going to bed. Picasso woke up at 11:30 a.m., but he was unable to get out of bed. Jacqueline called his physician, Dr. Jean-Claude Rance, for assistance, but he died at 11:40 a.m. before a doctor arrived.

Picasso 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 1961. Jacqueline prevented Picasso's children Maya, Claude, and Paloma, and his grandson Pablito from seeing his body. Only Paulo, the sole legitimate child of Picasso, was allowed to attend the funeral.

Picasso died without a will, which led to a feud over his estate. His three illegitimate children were granted the right to share the Picasso estate by French judges, despite opposition from Jacqueline and Paulo. Following the death of Paulo in 1975, Picasso's surviving heirs were his widow, Jacqueline; his grandchildren from Paulo, Marina and Bernard; and his children, Claude, Paloma and Maya. They reached a settlement on how to divide Picasso's $240 million estate in December 1976.

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. 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. 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.

The medium in which Picasso made his most important contribution was painting. In his paintings, Picasso used colour as an expressive element, but relied on drawing rather than subtleties of colour to create form and space. 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. 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. 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".

From the beginning of his career, Picasso displayed an interest in subject matter of every kind, 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. …

Picasso has been characterised as a womaniser and a misogynist, being quoted as saying to his longtime partner Françoise Gilot that "women are machines for suffering." He later allegedly told her, "For me there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats." 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."

From early adolescence, Picasso maintained both superficial and intense amatory sexual relationships. Biographer John Richardson stated that 'work, sex, and tobacco' were his addictions. Picasso was married twice and had four children with three women:

Picasso married ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova in 1918. In 1935, Picasso began divorce proceedings, but Khokhlova refused to divorce. They legally separated in 1941, but remained married until Khokhlova's death in 1955.

When Picasso's mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter gave birth to their daughter Maya in 1935, he secretly placed them in an apartment at 44 rue de La Boétie in the 8th arrondissement, which was across from his residence with his wife Olga at number 23. In 1937, Marie-Thérèse and Maya were sent to Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre. Maya was 10 years old when she learned that she had an older brother, Paulo.

Photographer and painter Dora Maar was 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.

In December 1961, Picasso's children with artist Françoise Gilot, Claude and Paloma, were granted full legal rights to use the name Picasso after their father legally recognised his paternity in a written statement submitted to a French court. However, ten years later, Picasso successfully contested a legal case in which he refused to acknowledge paternity. Three weeks following the 1961 court case, newspapers revealed his second marriage to Jacqueline Roque, a salesgirl at a pottery store. In her 1964 book Life with Picasso, Gilot describes his abusive treatment and myriad infidelities which led her to leave him, taking the children with her in 1953. The book angered Picasso and he severed ties with his children. …