Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was an Andalusian-Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. As one of the most recognized figures in twentieth-century art, he is best known for co-founding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles embodied in his work. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, Guernica (1937). Here is few great Picasso paintings:

picasso_selfport1907

Self Portrait 1907

picasso_lesdemoiselles  Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 1907 With its hacked contours, staring interrogatory eyes, and general feeling of instability, Les Demoiselles is still a disturbing painting after three quarters of a century, a refutationof the idea that the surprise of art, like the surprise of fasion, must necessarily wear off. No painting ever looked more convulsive. None signalled a faster change in the history of art. Yet it was anchored in tradition, and its attack on the eye would never have been so startling if its format had not been that of the classical nude; the three figures at the left are a distant but unmistakable echo of that favourite image of the late Renaissance, the Three Graces. Picasso began it in the year Cezanne died, 1906, and its nearest ancestor seems to have been Cezanne’s monumental composition of the bathers displaying their blockish, angular bodies beneath arching trees. Its other line of descent in Picasso’s Spanish heritage. The bodies of the two caryatid-like standing nudes, and to a lesser degree their neaighbour on the right, twist like El Greco’s figures. And the angular, harshly lit blue space between them closely resembles the drapery in El Greco’s Dumbarton Oaks Visitation. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, p21. London: Thames & Hudson 1991  

 

gertrudestein Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. When someone commented that Stein didn’t look like her portrait, Picasso replied, “She will”.

portrait_of_daniel-henry_kahnweiler_1910 
Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910, The Art Institute of Chicago. Picasso wrote of Kahnweiler What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn’t had a business sense? 

sabine Rape of the Sabine Women, 1963 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)