Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso produced perhaps 50,000 works across seventy-five years and changed the direction of Western art more than once. Born in Málaga in 1881 to an art teacher, he was drawing competently as a small child, and his father is said to have given him his own brushes on realising he had been surpassed. He trained in Barcelona and briefly in Madrid, and moved to Paris in 1904. His Blue Period from 1901, of beggars and blind men in cold monochrome, followed the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas, and gave way to the warmer Rose Period of acrobats and harlequins. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 broke with everything. Five prostitutes are shown from multiple viewpoints at once, two with faces taken from Iberian sculpture and African masks, and the picture disturbed even his allies; Braque said it was like drinking petrol to spit fire. With Braque he then developed Cubism from 1908, dismantling objects into facets and reassembling them on a flat surface, and in 1912 introduced collage, gluing oilcloth and newspaper into paintings and ending the assumption that a picture is made only of paint. He designed for Diaghilev's ballet, worked in a neoclassical manner in the 1920s, and moved close to surrealism. Guernica, painted in weeks in 1937 after the German bombing of the Basque town for the Spanish Republic's pavilion, is the most famous political painting of the century. He remained in occupied Paris throughout the war and joined the Communist Party in 1944. His treatment of the women in his life was frequently cruel, and two of them killed themselves. He worked until the day before his death in 1973.

• Lived: 1881 CE – 1973 CE
• Nationality: Spanish
• Roles: painter, sculptor