Pablo Ruiz Picasso
October 25, 1881 - April 8, 1973
Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain and is probably most famous as the founder
of Cubism, along with Georges Braque. During his
long life he produced a varied body of work, the best known being the Blue
Period works which featured moving depictions of acrobats, harlequins, prostitutes,
beggars, and artists.
While Picasso was mainly a painter, he also worked with small ceramic and
bronze sculptures, collage, and even produced some poetry.
Many of Picasso's painting rank among the highest in the world. In 1999,
his Les Noces de Pierrette (The Marriage of Pierrette) sold for more
than $51 million USD and in 2004 Picasso's painting Garcon ˆ la Pipe
was sold for $104 million at Sotheby's,which established a new price record.
Picasso's most famous work is probably his depiction of the German bombing
of Guernica, Spain. This large canvas illustrates for many the inhumanity,
brutality and hopelessness of war. A Nazi officer is supposed to have come
to his door brandishing a postcard and demanding, "Did you do this?" "No,"
Picasso is supposed to have replied, "you did." The Guernica hung in New York's
Museum of Modern Art for many years, and is now in Madrid -- Picasso stipulated
that the painting should not return to Spain until democracy was restored
in that country.
In his 80s and 90s, Picasso, no longer quite the energetic dynamo he had
been in his youth, became more, and more reclusive. He devoted his full energies
to his work and became more daring, his works more colorful and expressive,
and from 1968 through 1971 he produced a torrent of paintings and hundreds
of copperplate engravings. One long time admirer, Douglas Cooper called them
"the incoherent scribblings of a frenetic old man in the antechamber of death."
Only a decade later, after Picasso's death, when the rest of the art world
had moved on from abstract expressionism, did the critical community come
to see that Picasso had already discovered neo-espressionism, and was, as
usual, ahead of his time.
Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973 at Mougins, France, and was interred
at Castle Vauvenargues' park, in Vauvenargues, Bouches-du-Rhone. At the time
of his death, Picasso, by now a multi millionaire, owned a vast quantity of
his own work, consisting of personal favorites which he had kept off the art
market, or which he had not needed to sell. In addition, Picasso had a considerable
collection of the work of other famous artists, some his contemporaries, like
Henri Matisse, with whom he had exchanged works. Since Picasso left no will,
his death duties, or estate tax to the French state were paid in the form
of his works, and others from his collection. These works form the core of
the immense, and representative collection of the MusŽe Picasso in Paris.
And recently in 2003, relatives of Picasso inaugurated a museum dedicated
to him, in his hometown of Malaga, Spain, called the Museo Picasso Malaga.
