Painter, sculptor, engraver and Spanish ceramist. That he invents the cubism with his friend Braque, that he dawdles on the side of surrealism, the expressionism, even of the abstraction, or that he dares a neo-classic bracket, Picasso, painter, draftsman, engraver, sculptor and ceramist, launches out on all the ways of the modern art, that he upsets and gives up also quickly, untiring destructor and extraordinary creative.

Aragon will say that “all that one advances, it contradicted it at once”.

Born in 1881 in Málaga, Pablo Ruiz Blasco Picasso carries out his first works there as of the eight years age.

In Corogne, in the north of Spain, where his/her father is named art teacher, it follows to the school of the fine arts a traditional formation, supplemented as from 1895 with the Academy of Barcelona. It gives up soon the traditional style of its first works to adopt the forms of international Jugendstil. A fluid and serpentine line, flat tints of bright colors characterize the projects of decoration which it conceives for the cabaret of the Catalan avant-garde, Els Gats.

Since 1900, Picasso goes to Paris, where it will settle definitively in 1904 with the “Boat wash-house”. The interest which it carries to Van Gogh will show through in the series of portraits and self-portraits of 1901. The same year, Ambroise Vollard presents the first great exposure of the artist - who signs nothing any more but name of his mother -, made up of 64 paintings of impressionist spirit; the critic Gustave Coquiot greets the “frantic lover of the modern life”.

The suicide of the young Catalan artist Carlos Casagemas, on on June 17th, 1901, is at the origin of the blue period, cycles allegorical which culminates with camaieu of the Life (1903): homage to the missing friend, whose features merge with those of the painter, and homage to painting (of works of Klimt and Gauguin are reproduced there, while the topic of the painter and his model is set up there). Cold color, blue makes it possible Picasso to express his vision of the world, then in charge with concern and nostalgia. Its blue Self-portrait (1901), where it is represented prematurely out-of-date, resounds like an acknowledgment of impotence.

The topic of loneliness and existential concern dominates as much the period known as “pink” (1905-1906) because of the color - a rosy, soft and sad gray - which supplants the blue monochromy. Harlequin, Pierrot and Guano, jugglers, acrobats (Acrobat with the ball, 1905) and riders with the slender body seem inhabited of a deaf melancholy, and the Jugglers (1905) wander in the universe of destitution of the wandering entertainers.

The progressive abandonment of this sentimental esthetics is translated, during the summer 1906, at the time of a stay with Gósol, in Catalonia, by a series of naked of traditional inspiration, with full and round volumes, drawn up on funds pink sharp (Two Brothers, 1906). Spirit of examination, synthesis and rigor which one finds in the pink Self-portrait, which marks a decisive turn in the art of Picasso: the face transformed into inexpressive mask and geometrical volumes carry the mark of Cézanne and the Iberian sculpture préromane, two of the fundamental sources of the cubism. The first wood carved in the direct face, following the example of those of Gauguin (Fernande, 1906), also concern this aspiration to primitivism. Some works of 1906, like seizing Portrait of Gertrude Stein or the Two intertwined Nude women, already deformed and colossal, can be regarded as heralding the Young ladies of Avignon of the following year. The large fabric that Picasso named itself “a fabric of exorcism” (of sexuality and death) puts in scene five nude women at the angular bodies, dislocated, solidified in solidified hangings and soliciting the spectator of their insistent glances. Work complexes where the influences mix with Cézanne, the Iberian sculpture and negro art, sensitive on the excentric and hatched faces bright colors of the two young ladies of right-hand side.

The “Cubist revolution” is as much the work of Directs as that of Picasso. After a phase cézannienne, marked by an increased geometrization of the forms and the stressing of returned volumes (the Three Women, 1908), the cubism is constituted in a form known as “analytical”: volumes are burst, put flat and are dissected in small plans transparent, opened and slipping one in another (the Guitarist, 1910).

Seeking how to represent what has three dimensions on a surface which has of them only two without resorting to the processes traditional illusionists and while preserving the feeling of reality, Braque and Picasso answers by new conventions which make the reading of works difficult since the usual reference marks (colors, light, volumes and prospects) are replaced by a system of nonimitative geometrical signs and by a strict monochromy - only the beige and the gray have established among - which reinforce the purely mental and conceptual character of the representation (the Accordionist, 1911). In 1912, in order to avoid the pitfall of the abstraction and to approach reality more closely, the two painters introduce into their works all kinds of materials: pieces of string, of fabric and wood, sheets flame-cut, paper, paperboard, newspaper cuttings, even partitions and card to be playeds, integrated such as they are in the set of lines of a drawing or cut with the shape of an object, transform into died natures, sown letters printed with the stencil key set or raised painting (Still life with the caned chair, 1912). The assemblies of cut out and tied up ends of paperboard are suspended on the wall (Guitar, 1912); paintings and drawings are covered with plaster, sand and sawdust (Studying with the pipe, 1913-1914).

In 1914, the cubism evolves to “synthetic” compositions: great superimposed geometrical plans, pointillism and bright colors characterize paintings of more decorative aspect (My pretty) and objects with mid- chemin between painting and sculpture (Table-relief: glass, pipe, ace of clover and die), to which pop art will make echo.

Solicited by Jean Cocteau, Picasso collaborates with the Russian Ballet of Diaghilev: the cubism enters in scene (Parade, on a music of Erik Satie, in 1917). The world of the circus, the commedia Dell-arte and expensive traditional Antiquity to its youth re-appears following a stay in Italy. If the theater becomes populated of a whole procession of characters which does a pastiche of the Spanish folklore (the Tricorn, on a music of Manuel de Falla, in 1919) or Neapolitan (Pulcinella, with Stravinski, 1921), painting reflects a situation more complex than portraits with the realism wrongly described as “ingresque suggest it” (Portrait of Olga, 1917), who translate an undeniable return to the figuration, moreover started since 1914 (the Painter and its model). Beside a little insipid portraits of family (Paul as a Harlequin, 1924), one finds these “large bathers” draped, with the face dreamer (Naked sitted with drapery, 1921), whose hypertrophied forms and gravity of statue agree badly with the traditional ideal. The same year, the parallel execution of two monumental works, completely paradoxical, the Three Women with the fountain, true pastiche of the Greek statuary and Chick, on the one hand, and the two versions of the Three Musicians, assembled on the coloured geometrical surfaces characteristic of the synthetic cubism, on the other hand, is revealing of this cohabitation of the styles which dominates work then.

Present at the surrealist exposure of 1925, supported by André Breton, Picasso will be never surrealist in a strict sense. The antiartistic attitudes, the spontaneous practices “automatic” and the design even as the surrealist ones are made image as “copies dream” materialized on the web do not correspond to its concrete and pragmatic approach of reality. But, to see the production violently expressionist of this period, one understands the confusion maintained by Breton.

Since 1925, the Dance and the Kiss, with their dislocated forms and their strident colors, evoke a convulsed atmosphere worked by fright of “the insane love”. The portraits of woman translate the emotional load which painting can be carrying. Victims of its baited violence, they monstrously appear deformed in insupportable torsions, the face disfigured and notched teeth (Large Naked with the red armchair, 1929). Even the bathers take the worrying shapes of insects (Bather sitting at the seaside, 1930). Dislocation of the bodies which one finds in the series of carved figures, or rather built in the space, which it is with welded wires (Figure, project of 1928 for a monument with Guillaume Apollinaire) or wrought iron parts assembled with heteroclite objects (the Woman with the garden, 1929-1930).

In January 1927, a new love, Marie-Therese Walter, is essential like omnipresent model. In its innumerable portraits, always dominated by the arabesque and of the fresh and luminous colors, it seems a blonde odalisque unrolling the curves of its luxuriant flesh or dreaming, isolated in a space hermetically closed, captive (the Dream, 1932), just like its rival, Dora Maar, with the profile frayed, represented capped incredible hats, forming a unit with an armchair fixed in a prison space, image even of the suffering in the Woman who cries (1937). Between the two women, Picasso plays the part of a mythical figure, appraisal of surrealist, Minotaure, in which he recognized his own erotic impulses and mortifères (Minotauromachie, etching of 1937).

After the fatal bombardment of Guernica, on on April 26th, 1937, Picasso, who had received ordering of a painting to decorate a house with the Spanish Republic of the International exhibition of 1937, changes the initial subject - a scene of workshop - to express his anger against the torturers of his people. The eternal cry of suffering and despair of humanity gives place to a vast allegory prepared by sixty drawings and paintings of begging women and faces in tears. Absence of colors, monumental format, of the figures to the eloquent gestures which are detached from the bottom plunged into mourning. The enormous head of bull to the bestial boor becomes the emblem of the absolute evil, vis-a-vis the broken horse, eternal innocent victim. On the ground, cut heads, executed bodies, scattered members, children with the dead eyes and women desperate return to the topic of the massacre of the innocent. Card-indexed in full heart of the fabric, a torch - symbol of the eternal light - delivers a message of hope. But the time is with anger, mourning, the revolt: the Cat seizing a bird (1939), the Dawn serenade (1942), the Mass grave (1947), unfinished because the artist finds “impossible to paint the horror of the camps”, and, to finish, the monumental bronze of the Man to the sheep (1945).

In spite of some works of circumstance like the famous Dove of peace, the adhesion of Picasso to the Communist party, in 1944, does not involve any allegiance with the dogma of socialist realism. On the contrary, the Release, the happiness of a new family and the proximity of the Mediterranean generate a set of works breathing the Love of life (1945), since such is the title of the work most characteristic of the time: the vast blued orgy, created in the rooms of the castle of Antibes, celebrates the radiant beauty of its new MUSE, Francoise Gilot, and her return to the ancient Mediterranean sources. A whole lower classes of faunas and centaurs leaping with the pure and diagrammatic forms start to invade painting (Triptych: satyr, fauna and centaur with the javelin, 1946) and the ceramics, which it practices as from 1946 in Vallauris, mixing traditional forms and empirical techniques. The sculpture also testifies to its genius of inventor. Its Goat (1950) is born from an old wicker basket, shards of ceramics and sheets of palm, his/her Little girl jumping to the cord (1950) is fitted true shoes and is capped corrugated cardboard: the life and humor began again.

Twenty years after the death of Picasso (in Mougins, in 1973), it is noted that they are precisely the forms and the artistic practices at the time most disparaged which are regarded as the evidence of an unaltered talent and a youth. The invoice insolente of freedom, unfinished character, “skimped on” of paintings (Couple, 1970-1971), signs of “infantilism” and “regression” or anticipation of the return to the painting of the years 1980? Prevalence of the variations and pastiches of the masterpieces of the past (Women of Algiers de Delacroix, 1954-1955; Ménines de Vélasquez, 1956-1959; the Lunch on grass of Manet, 1960-1961), consents of sterility and impotence to renew itself or exercises of style virtuosos? Omnipresence, through the topics of the kiss and of the painter and his model (glorified in sumptuous “the workshops” of last engravings, called “the 156” and “347”, and dominated by the sovereign figure of its Jacqueline wife, the MUSE of the years 1954-1973), of an unrestrained erotism, with comic and believed realism, could shock. Last fires of that which was the painter of the woman par excellence, last homages to the sensual pleasures of a life completely confused with painting, so much so that one of its last self-portraits, blazing it Vieil sitted Man (1970-1971), condenses with him only references to its preferred painters: Renoir, Matisse, Van Gogh, Cézanne.