Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881–1973,) fully Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso, also called (before 1901) Pablo Ruiz or Pablo Ruiz Picasso, was a Spanish painter, sculptor, and graphic artist. A resident in France from 1904, his prodigious creativity and technical versatility made him the foremost figure in avant-garde art in the first half of the 20th century. He experimented with a wide range of styles and themes in his long career, most notably inspiring ‘Cubism.’
Born in Málaga, Picasso grew up in Barcelona. He showed artistic talent at an early age. In the early 1900s, he moved between France and Spain before settling in Paris in 1904. He experimented with many styles and produced his own original ones, reflected in his ‘Blue’ and ‘Rose’ periods. The paintings of Blue Period (1901–04) used melancholic blue shades to represent social outsiders. During his Rose Period (1905–06,) he represented circus performers and acrobats in hues of pink and gray. His rejection of naturalism and his focus on the analysis and reduction of form evolved into cubism (1908–14,) embodied in such paintings as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907.)
In the 1920s and 1930s, Picasso adopted a neoclassical figurative style and evolved into a semi-surrealist painter. He portrayed more violent and morbid works in paintings such as The Three Dancers (1935.) His celebrated Guernica (1937) was inspired by the destruction of the Basque village by German bombers at the request of General Franco’s nationalist government.
Picasso is equally renowned for his sculpture. He pioneered the use of assembled instead of modeled or carved materials. The most famous example is his Head of a Bull, Metamorphosis (1943,) which comprises a bicycle saddle and handlebars.
Picasso’s eccentric and expansive lifestyle, his wealth and womanizing, and his scrupulously documented artistic technique are well known. For the popular French documentary Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso; 1956,) he painted with specially formulated inks and destroyed most of those paintings with the intention that they exist only on film.
Picasso inspired numerous books, including Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (1946) and Roland Penrose’s Portrait of Picasso (1957) and Picasso: His Life and Work (1958.) A comprehensive survey of his work is Christian Zervos’s Pablo Picasso: Oeuvres (21 vols., 1942–69.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Pablo Picasso
If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.
—Pablo Picasso
Everything you can imagine is real.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Imagination, Reality
Work is necessary for man. Man invented the alarm clock.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Work
Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Business, Art, Artists, Museums, Arts
Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: God
We must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Little Things, Things
I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Photography
Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Success
If everybody is looking for it, then nobody is finding it. If we were cultured, we would not be conscious of lacking culture. We would regard it as something natural and would not make so much fuss about it. And if we knew the real value of this word we would be cultured enough not to give it so much importance.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Culture
The chief enemy of creativity is “good” sense.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Vision, Creativity
It is your work in life that is your ultimate seduction.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Purpose
The essential in this time of moral poverty is to create enthusiasm.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Enthusiasm
Every child is born an artist. The trick is to remain an artist.
—Pablo Picasso
I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
—Pablo Picasso
It is my misfortune – and probably my delight – to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don’t go with the basket of fruit! … I put all the things I like into my pictures. The things – so much the worse for them. They just have to put up with it.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: The Artist
Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Censorship
The more technique you have, the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is, the less there is.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Talent
The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?
—Pablo Picasso
Love is the greatest refreshment in life.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Life, Love
Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art
Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Tyranny, Individuality
You mustn’t always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Trust
I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Money, Wealth
Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He recopies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He’s convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Drawing, The Artist
When you are young and without success, you have only a few friends. Then, later on, when you are rich and famous, you still have a few … if you are lucky.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Friendship
Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art
Drink to me.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Famous Last Words
I am always doing things I can’t do, that’s how I get to do them.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Success & Failure, Achievement
Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art
I do not seek. I find.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Discovery, Creativity
Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Artists, Art, Arts
If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Artists, Arts, Art
Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Goals, Action, Goal
One must act in painting as in life, directly.
—Pablo Picasso
The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Genius
It is personality with a penny’s worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Genius
I’m a joker who has understood his epoch and has extracted all he possibly could from the stupidity, greed and vanity of his contemporaries.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art
Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Miracles
Youth has no age.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Youth
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Georges Braque French Painter
Miguel de Unamuno Spanish Philosopher, Writer
Edgar Degas French Painter
Michelangelo Italian Painter
Grandma Moses American Painter
Claude Monet French Painter
Bahya ibn Paquda Jewish Philosopher
Jacinto Benavente Spanish Dramatist
Miguel de Cervantes Spanish Novelist
Lope de Vega Spanish Playwright