The young Picasso is encouraged by his art instructor father to draw and paint although the artist would eventually tell others that he was fascinated in the way that teachers wrote numbers on the blackboard.  He would copy their shapes with very little interest in their mathematical function and create drawings.  In 1894, Don Jose handed over his brushes and paints, vowing never to paint again, after watching his thirteen year old son masterfully complete the feet of some finished pigeons.  It was at about this time, that the young artist starts to sign his pictures 'Picasso', his mother's maiden name.

Picasso spent little in formal studies, attending the Barcelona School of Fine Arts from 1896-97 and the Royal Academy in Madrid for a few months in 1897. Along the way he submitted projects that were far more advanced than those of the senior students for their final exams.  In 1900, Picasso visited Paris for the first time and spent the next four years alternating between Barcelona and the City of Light.

In 1904 Picasso moved to Paris and became a member of a circle of avant-garde artists and writers while living in a bee hive shaped ramshackle building called Le Bateau Lavoir.  This period coincides with the artist's Blue Period, where he took his subjects from the poor and social outcasts, with a sentimentalized melancholy mood expressed through cold ethereal blue tones.  Picasso did a number of powerful etchings in a similar vein, including Le Repas Frugal (The Frugal Repast) in 1904.  The Rose Period would follow where the artist's palette softened with pinks, light reds and pale greys featuring circus players (saltimbanques), street performers, dancers and the harlequin.  On May 5, 2004 the 1905 Rose Period oil painting Boy with Pipe sold at auction for a record $104M to an anonymous bidder.

Influenced by African sculpture and the simplified forms of painter Paul Cezanne, Picasso began experimenting, along with artist Georges Braque, in using a multiplicity of viewpoints so that many different aspects of an object are present simultaneously in the same image.  The result is called Cubism—a derogatory title coined by critics who only saw pictures 'full of little cubes'.  His first full-fledged Cubist painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is created in 1907. The painting, initially shunned by his friends, remained in artist's studio until the Museum of Modern Art, New York purchased it in 1937 for $24,000.

Pablo Picasso was married only twice, to Olga and then Jacqueline, and had four children by three women.  Women played significant roles in his personal and creative life, most notably: Fernande Olivier (together 1904-1911), Eva Gouel (together 1911-1915), Olga Khokhlova (together 1917-1927; son Paulo born 1921), Marie Therese Walter (together 1927-1936; daughter Maya born 1935), Dora Maar (together 1936-1944), Francoise Gilot (together 1943-1953; son Claude born 1947; daughter Paloma born 1949) and Jacqueline Roche (together 1953-1973).

When seventeen year old Marie-Therese is spied outside Galerie Lafayette, Picasso approached her and boldly declared "Mademoiselle, you've got an interesting face. I'd like to paint your portrait. I am Picasso."  Her classical features, youth and purity inspired the artist and she figured as muse for his acclaimed 1930-1937 series of 100 etchings forming The Vollard Suite, named after prominent art dealer Ambroise Vollard.

In November 1945, Picasso set up shop at the Atelier Mourlot Freres, a well-known lithography studio in Paris.  The printmakers awaited the artist with skepticism as they had seen many painters pass through their print shop. According to master printer Jean Celestin "We gave him a stone and, two minutes later he was at work with crayon and brush.  And there was no stopping him.  As lithographers we were astounded by him."  The Picasso-Mourlot creative partnership resulted in ground-breaking lithographic techniques, never before utilized, and produced some of the finest examples of graphic prints ever created.  "He looked, he listened, he did the opposite of what he had learned—and it worked" Fernand Mourlot would later say of his artist friend "He is a friend and a man of extraordinary generosity."

Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973 at his home in the South of France at the age of 91.  During the last five years of his life, he was extremely productive in the medium of etching and created the famed 347 Suite—a group of 347 etchings created from March 1968 to October 1968.  This monumental printmaking feat was followed by a series of 156 etchings, aptly named the 156 Suite, which were published posthumously.  These final etchings created an extraordinary visual biography of the artist and allowed his lifetime cast of characters—artist & voluptuous model, copulating couples, circus troupes, Spanish lovers, languishing odalisques, famed personages and voyeuristic gentleman to 'speak' for themselves.

Quote:
"When you begin a picture, you often make some pretty discoveries.  You must be on guard against these.  Destroy it, do it over several times.  With each destruction of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes its more substantial.  What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds.  Otherwise you become your own connoisseur.  After all, I don't buy my own pictures."

Select Museum Collections:
Musee Picasso, Paris
Museu Picasso, Barcelona
Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg
Tate Gallery, London
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Art Institute of Chicago
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Source: askART/ Denis Bolch Fine Art