Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish artist and one of the most influential figures in all of modern art. Born in Malaga in 1881, he was a child prodigy who went on to reinvent his style many times over a career of more than seventy years. With his friend Georges Braque he invented Cubism, breaking objects into fragmented planes and showing them from several angles at once, a move that shattered centuries of tradition.

He worked in almost every medium, from painting and sculpture to ceramics and printmaking, and produced tens of thousands of works. His huge anti-war painting Guernica, made in response to the bombing of a Spanish town, is among the most powerful political images ever painted. Restless, prolific, and endlessly inventive, Picasso shaped the course of twentieth century art like almost no one else.