Pablo Picasso was a trailblazer in 20^th century art, which he endowed with new avenues of expression in different fields of creative activity. He was the son of the painter José Ruiz, and showed an early talent for drawing. In 1895 he joined the Barcelona School of Fine Arts and then attended school in Madrid. He took part in the National Exhibition of Fine Arts with the work Science and Charity (1897), which earned him an Honorary Mention. At the end of the 19^th century he was part of the circle of artists at Els Quatre Gats café, the meeting point of the Bohemian art scene of Barcelona. He travelled to Paris for the first time in 1900. A year later he embarked on his Blue Period, where he depicted beggars and outcasts. In 1904 he moved to the Bateau-Lavoir, a meeting place for artists where he met Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire and Henri Matisse. His Rose Period began in 1905, when he depicted circus themes, with more spirited figures in more classical forms, even though they would gradually become more synthetic, as can be seen in the portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906). A year later, he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the work which, along with his landscapes of Horta de Ebro, marked the start of Cubism. Picasso, Juan Gris and Georges Braque made up the avant-garde of Cubism, which would end up as a pictorial space depending on colour relations.

He moved to Montrouge during World War I. In Rome, he worked with Sergei Diaghilve and Jean Cocteau on the scenery and costumes for the ballet Parade (1917) and married the ballerina Olga Khokhlova in 1918. He also produced works with a clear neo-classical structure at the same time as key pieces within Cubism, such as The Three Musicians (1921). He came into contact with Surrealism, which led to his Dinard period. Expressionism gradually began to emerge in his work, particularly in Guernica, produced for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris. During the 1940s, he produced synthetic expressionist painting where the visual value of volume stems from colour, as in The Weeping Woman and Seated Woman series, whose aggressivity is countered by the beautiful nudes of 1942. At the end of World War II he moved to Antibes and then to Vallauris, where he worked on renovating the artistic value of ceramics. During the Vallauris years he produced two large allegoric panels on war and peace, which were followed by murals for Unesco (1958). In the 1950s he worked on famous variations of well-known works such as The Women of Algiers by Delacroix, Las meninas by Velázquez and The Luncheon on the Grass by Manet. After Olga died in 1955, Picasso married Jacqueline Roque in Vallauris in 1960. In 1963 he opened the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.

The retrospective exhibitions held at the Tate Gallery (London, 1960), at the Grand Palais (Paris, 1966) and at the Petit Palais (Paris) to celebrate his 85^th birthday and at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1980) highlight his universal acclaim. Other exhibitions have since explored different aspects of his work, such as ‘Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism’ at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1989); ‘Picasso and the Age of Iron’ at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 1993); ‘Picasso: The Great Series’ at the Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2001); ‘Picasso Sculpture’ at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2015); and the recent ‘Pity and Terror – Picasso’ at the Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2017).

• Julián Gállego Serrano
• María José Alonso