Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter and sculptor. One of the most recognized figures in 20th century art, he is best known as the co-founder, along with Georges Braque, of cubism. It has been estimated that Picasso produced about 13,500 paintings, 100,000 prints or engravings, 34,000 book illustrations and 300 sculptures or ceramics.

Picasso was born in 1881 in Malaga, Spain. The son of a drawing teacher, the young Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. It was from his father that Picasso had his first formal academic art training, such as figure drawing and painting in oil. Although Picasso attended carpenter schools throughout his childhood, often those where his father taught, he never finished his college-level course of study at the Academy of Arts in Madrid, leaving after less than a year.

In the early years of the twentieth century, Picasso, still a struggling youth, divided his time between Barcelona and Paris, and spent time with a distinguished circle of friends in the Montmartre and Montparnasse quarters, including André Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, and writer Gertrude Stein.

Picasso's work is often categorized into "periods". The Blue Period of Picasso, between 1901 and 1904, was when the style of Pablo Picasso's paintings was heavily emotional, often in the form of blue colors. The Rose Period signifies the time when the style of his painting used cheerful orange and pink colors. It lasted from 1905 to 1907, followed by the African Period, Analytic and Synthetic Cubism, Classic and Surrealist periods.

By 1936, the artist was profoundly influenced by the Spanish Civil War. This resulted in his famous painting "Guernica" (1937), dominated by mythological and Spanish themes, the Minotaur and the bullfight, which became symbols of the War and the Fascist atrocities.

Picasso has become the object of a myth to the detriment of the understanding of his work and what makes its originality. It can be said that he almost single-handedly created Modern Art and surely changed Art more profoundly than any other artist of this century.

Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973 in Mougins, France at the age of 91.