Picasso, Pablo 1881-1973
Spanish painter, the dominating figure of early 20th-century French art and a pioneer of Cubism

Picasso was born in Malaga, Andalusia, the son of an art teacher, Jos� Ruiz Blasco, and Maria Picasso y Lopez, whose maiden name he adopted. At the age of 14 he entered the academy at Barcelona (where his family had moved); there he painted Barefoot Girl (1895). After two years he transferred to Madrid for more advanced study. In 1898 he won a gold medal for Customs of Aragon, which was exhibited in his native town.

In 1901 he set up in a studio at 13 Rue de Ravignon (now Place �mile-Goudeau), Montmartre. By now he was a master of the traditional forms of art, shown for example in his Gypsy Girl on the Beach (1898), and he quickly absorbed the Neo-Impressionist influences of the Paris school of Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas and �douard Vuillard, as exemplified in Longchamp (1901), The Blue Room (1901), and other works. However, he soon began to develop his own idiom.

The blue period (1902-04; referring to colours as well as mood), a series of striking studies of the poor in haunting attitudes of despair and gloom, gave way to the bright, life-affirming pink period (1904-06), in which Picasso achieved for harlequins, acrobats and the incidents of circus life what Degas had done for the ballet. Pink turned to brown in La Coiffure (1905-06) and the remarkable portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906).

His interest in sculpture and his new enthusiasm for black art are fully reflected in the transitional Two Nudes (1906), which heralded his epoch-making break with tradition in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1906-07), the first full-blown example of analytical Cubism, an attempt to render the three-dimensional on the flat picture surface without resorting to perspective. Nature was no longer to be copied, decorated or idealized, but exploited for creative ends. Its exclusive emphasis on formal, geometrical criteria contrasted sharply with the cult of colour of the Fauvists, to whom he and Georges Braque for a time belonged, before the two joined forces in 1909 for their exploration of Cubism through its various phases; analytic, synthetic, hermetic and rococo, in which collage, pieces of wood, wire, newspaper and string became media side by side with paint. The Ma Jolie series of pictures, after the music-hall song score which appears in them (1911-14), are examples of the last phase.

Braque broke with Picasso in 1914. From 1917 Picasso, through Jean Cocteau, became associated with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, designing costumes and sets for Parade (1917), Le Tricorne (1919), Pulcinella (1920), Le Train bleu (1924), in both Cubist and neoclassical styles, and thus made the former acceptable to a wider public. The grotesque facial and bodily distortions of the Three Dancers (1925) foreshadows the immense canvas of Guernica (1937), which expressed in synthetic Cubism Picasso's horror of the bombing of this Basque town during the Civil War, of war in general and compassion and hope for its victims. The canvas was exhibited in the Spanish Pavilion in the Paris World Fair (1937) and Picasso became director of the Prado Gallery, Madrid (1936-39).

During World War II Picasso was mostly in Paris, and after the liberation he joined the Communists. Neither Guernica nor his portrait of Stalin (1953) commended him to the Party. He designed stage sets for Cocteau and Roland Petit, illustrated translations of classical texts, experimented in sculpture, ceramics and lithography, allowed his canvas to be filmed while at work and wrote a play.

Picasso worked in a great variety of media, and was above all an innovator. As well as sculpture and painting, he produced constructions in metal, pottery, drawings, engravings, aquatints and lithographs. A film was made of him at work in his studio. His first wife was Olga Kokhloven, a dancer with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. After leaving her in 1931 he had a series of mistresses, some of whom modelled for him and one of whom, Jacqueline Roque, married him in 1961.

Bibliography: John Richardson, A Life of Picasso (2 vols, 1996); Norman Mailer, Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man (1996); T Hilton, Picasso (1976); R Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work (1958).