Pablo Picasso Oil 1941 For Auction at 888 Auctions on August 15, 2019

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973) was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. His ingenious use of form, color, and perspective profoundly impacted later generations of painters. Artists such as Willem de Kooning and David Hockney. “There are artists who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun,” he once said.

Born October 25, 1881 in Málaga, Spain, Pablo Picasso’s name was unique. His name is more a sentence, Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María de los Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso. His prodigious talent was cultivated early on by his father the painter Jose Ruíz Blasco. Picasso then attended the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Barcelona shortly before settling in Paris in 1904.

Immersed in the avant-garde circles of Gertrude Stein, he transitioned from Neo-Impressionism through the Blue Period and Rose Period, before reaching a culmination in his masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Constantly in search of pictorial solutions and in dialogue with his friend Georges Braque, Picasso melded forms he saw in African sculpture with the multiple perspectives he gleaned from Paul Cézanne, to produce Cubism.

Not limited to painting, the artist also expressed himself through collage, sculpture, and ceramics. He was deeply affected by the ongoing Spanish Civil War. As a result, Picasso created what is arguably his most overtly political work Guernica (1937), a mural-sized painting depicting carnage with jagged shapes and contrasting grayscale. The artist was prolific up until his death on April 8, 1973 in Mougins, France.

Today, his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.  Others include institutions devoted solely to his life work, such as the Museo Picasso Málaga, the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, and the Musée National Picasso in Paris.