PABLO PICASSO

SPANISH PAINTER, SCULPTOR, PRINTMAKER,

CERAMICIST & THEATRE DESIGNER

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (October 25, 1881 - April 8, 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist & theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for

co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the

co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German

and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.

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Picasso's influence was and remains immense and widely acknowledged by his admirers and detractors alike. On the occasion of his 1939 retrospective at MoMA, Life magazine wrote: "During the 25 years he has dominated modern European art, his enemies say he

has been a corrupting influence. With equal violence, his friends say he is the greatest artist alive."  Picasso was the first artist to receive a special honor exhibition at the Grand Gallery of the Louvre Museum in Paris in celebration of his 90 years.  In 1998, Robert Hughes wrote of him: "To say that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace.  No painter or sculptor, not even Michelangelo, had been as famous as this in his own lifetime.  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."