Pablo Ruiz Picasso[a][b] (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France.

One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture,[8][9] the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore.

Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.

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 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.

[32] The same mood pervades the well-known etching The Frugal Repast (1904),[33] which depicts a blind man and a sighted woman, both emaciated, seated at a nearly bare table.

The Rose Period (1904–1906)[34] is characterized by a lighter tone and style utilizing orange and pink colours and featuring many circus people, acrobats and harlequins known in France as saltimbanques.

Kahnweiler promoted burgeoning artists such as André Derain, Kees van Dongen, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Maurice de Vlaminck and several others who had come from all over the globe to live and work in Montparnasse at the time.

[42] In Paris, Picasso entertained a distinguished coterie of friends in the Montmartre and Montparnasse quarters, including André Breton, poet Guillaume Apollinaire, writer Alfred Jarry and Gertrude Stein.

[45][46] Between 1915 and 1917, Picasso began a series of paintings depicting highly geometric and minimalist Cubist objects, consisting of either a pipe, a guitar or a glass, with an occasional element of collage.

[60] In 1925 the Surrealist writer and poet André Breton declared Picasso as "one of ours" in his article Le Surréalisme et la peinture, published in Révolution surréaliste.

He did at the time develop new imagery and formal syntax for expressing himself emotionally, "releasing the violence, the psychic fears and the eroticism that had been largely contained or sublimated since 1909", writes art historian Melissa McQuillan.

Until 1981 it was entrusted to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, as it was Picasso's expressed desire that the painting should not be delivered to Spain until liberty and democracy had been established in the country.

The politicized nature of the work is largely attributed to his romantic relationship at the time with the French anti-fascist activist and surrealist photographer, Dora Maar.

This exhibition lionized Picasso, brought into full public view in America the scope of his artistry, and resulted in a reinterpretation of his work by contemporary art historians and scholars.

[68] According to Jonathan Weinberg, "Given the extraordinary quality of the show and Picasso's enormous prestige, generally heightened by the political impact of Guernica ... the critics were surprisingly ambivalent".

Largely untitled except for a date and sometimes the location of where they were written (for example "Paris 16 May 1936"), these works were gustatory, erotic, and at times scatological, as were his two full-length plays, Desire Caught by the Tail (1941), The Four Little Girls (1949) and The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1959).

[77] By this time, Picasso had constructed a huge Gothic home, and could afford large villas in the south of France, such as Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie on the outskirts of Mougins, and in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur.

[citation needed] In addition to his artistic accomplishments, Picasso made a few film appearances, always as himself, including a cameo in Jean Cocteau's Testament of Orpheus (1960).

[83] Pablo Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France, from pulmonary edema and a heart attack, the morning after he and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner.

Soon after hostilities began, the Republicans appointed him "director of the Prado, albeit in absentia", and "he took his duties very seriously", according to John Richardson, supplying the funds to evacuate the museum's collection to Geneva.

)[94][95][96] In the late 1940s, his old friend surrealist poet André Breton, who was a Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist, was more blunt;[97] refusing to shake hands with Picasso, he told him: "I don't approve of your joining the Communist Party nor with the stand you have taken concerning the purges of the intellectuals after the Liberation.

[109] 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".

[112] From the beginning of his career, Picasso displayed an interest in subject matter of every kind,[113] and demonstrated a great stylistic versatility that enabled him to work in several styles at once.

Though Marcel Duchamp, that cunning old fox of conceptual irony, has certainly had more influence on nominally vanguard art over the past 30 years than Picasso, the Spaniard was the last great beneficiary of the belief that the language of painting and sculpture really mattered to people other than their devotees.

The museum also holds many precise and detailed figure studies done in his youth under his father's tutelage, as well as the extensive collection of Jaime Sabartés, his close friend and personal secretary.

[citation needed] As of 2015[update], Picasso remained the top-ranked artist (based on sales of his works at auctions) according to the Art Market Trends report.

The 1932 work, which depicts Picasso's mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter reclining and as a bust, was in the personal collection of Los Angeles philanthropist Frances Lasker Brody, who died in November 2009.

[140] The women in Picasso's life played an important role in the emotional and erotic aspects of his creative expression, and the tumultuous nature of these relationships has been considered vital to his artistic process.

The first volume of the catalogue, Works from 1895 to 1906, published in 1932, entailed the financial ruin of Zervos, self-publishing under the name Cahiers d'art, forcing him to sell part of his art collection at auction to avoid bankruptcy.