Although Picasso's father taught him to draw and paint and gave him money to continue his studies in Paris, for some reason Picasso turned against him. He dropped his father’s last name and used his mother's. When his father died, Picasso did not go to the funeral.
By the age of 15 he was already pretty skilled in drawing and painting. In addition to painting and drawing he was also interested in sculptures, ceramics, and art forms. He became one of the most influential artists of the 1900’s.
Picasso painted in many styles, including cubism and expressionism. He also sculpted. In cubism, he tried to show the dimensions of the objects in his paintings. When he painted in the classical style, his shapes were round and soft. In cubism, his shapes were square and hard. Because he could work in multiple styles, Picasso became very famous. He used great lines and color in his paintings.
Picasso met a ballerina named Olga Koklova and married her in 1918. They had one son. By 1935, he had left Olga for Maria-Theresa Walter, who bore him a daughter.
During Picasso’s “Blue period” (1901-1904), he painted in shades of blue, giving a feeling of sadness. After he moved to Paris in 1904, his rose period started in which he took on a more optimistic mood. In 1907 he and French painter George Braque pioneered cubism. By 1912 Picasso had started to incorporate newspaper print, postage stamps and other materials into his paintings (this style is called collage). By the late 1920’s he turned toward a simple cubist-related style. During the 1930’s his paintings became militant and political. Images of violence appeared in his work from 1928, leading to his masterpiece Guernica (1937). The painting showed the horror of brutality in one incident in the Spanish Civil War. Picasso never returned to Spain. Franco's government later requested that the painting should be hung in the Madrid Museum of Modern Art, but Picasso specified that it should only go to Spain when the fascist government had fallen.
In 1939, Picasso had his most important exhibition in New York, entitled “Forty years of his Life", which contained 344 pieces of his work.
In 1940, the Germans entered Paris. Picasso stayed, although he had taken a public stance against fascism and was distrusted because of his communist friends. He was forbidden to exhibit his work.
After the Liberation, he joined the Communist Party. He lived with Françoise Gilot until 1953, when she left him, taking their two children with her. In 1961, when he was in his eighties, he married a 35-year-old model, Jacqueline Roche.
Following World War Two, Picasso’s work became less political and gentler. He spent the remaining years of his life exploring many historical styles of art, making several reproductions of the work of earlier artists.
Picasso died on April 8, 1973 at his home, Notre-Dame-De-Vie in Mougin, France. He was buried on April 10, at his castle Vauvenagues, 170 kilometers from Mougin.
