Who was Pablo Picasso? His periods, Cubism and Guernica

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor and printmaker, born in Málaga in 1881, who lived most of his life in France and died there in 1973 at 91. Who was Pablo Picasso to modern art? The artist who, with Georges Braque, invented Cubism, which broke with five centuries of painting things from a single point of view, and who painted Guernica, the most famous protest against war in modern art.

In short

• His work moved through distinct periods, from the sad Blue Period of his early twenties to Cubism, a classical style and Surrealism, and he kept changing until he died.
• Cubism, made with Braque from about 1907 to 1914, shows an object from several viewpoints at once on a flat canvas, and its collages brought real materials into painting.
• Guernica (1937) answers the bombing of a Basque town in the Spanish Civil War with no planes or bombs in sight, only suffering in black, white and gray.

Who was Picasso, in brief?

His father was a painting teacher, and Picasso was drawing like a trained adult by his early teens. He studied in A Coruña, Barcelona and Madrid, and in 1904 settled in Paris, then the center of the art world. He was extraordinarily prolific, making paintings, sculptures, prints, ceramics and stage designs, and he was famous and rich for most of his long life. He never returned to Spain after 1934, and refused to while Francisco Franco ruled it.

His career is usually told as a series of periods. The labels are art historians', the dates approximate, and he often worked in more than one style at once.

Period	Years	What it looks like	One work
Blue	1901–1904	Thin, sad figures of the poor and blind, in shades of blue	The Old Guitarist (1903–1904)
Rose	1904–1906	Warmer pinks and oranges; circus performers and harlequins	Family of Saltimbanques (1905)
African-influenced	1907–1909	Mask-like faces, angular bodies, flattened space	Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
Analytic Cubism	1909–1912	Objects broken into small facets, in browns and grays	Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910)
Synthetic Cubism	1912–1919	Bigger flat shapes, brighter color, pasted paper and collage	Still Life with Chair Caning (1912)
Neoclassical	about 1918–1925	Heavy, calm figures like ancient statues	Three Women at the Spring (1921)
Surrealist	about 1925–1930s	Dreamlike, distorted bodies; the Minotaur	Girl before a Mirror (1932)

The African-influenced period needs care. Picasso saw African masks and sculpture in Paris museums and collections, and they helped him break with European realism. But he knew little of their makers or meanings, and many of the objects reached Paris through colonial seizure, which is why museums now present that influence alongside its history.

How does Cubism work?

Cubism shows an object from several viewpoints at the same time, on a surface that admits it is flat. Since the Renaissance, European painting had used linear perspective: one viewer, standing still, looking through a window. Paul Cézanne, late in the 19th century, had begun painting objects as if seen from slightly different positions. Picasso and Braque, working side by side from about 1907 to 1914, took that much further. The critic Louis Vauxcelles said Braque's paintings of 1908 reduced everything "to cubes", and the name stuck.

Here is the method, step by step, with a wine glass on a table.

1. Look from more than one place. From the side, the glass is a tall outline; from above, its rim is a circle; from a low angle, the base is an oval.
2. Break it into planes. Instead of shading one smooth glass, divide what you see from each angle into flat, overlapping facets.
3. Put the views side by side. On the canvas, the side profile and the circle of the rim can sit next to each other, so the glass is described more fully than any single view could.
4. Hold back color. In Analytic Cubism, from 1909 to 1912, the palette shrank to browns and grays so that structure, not color, held attention. The pictures became so fragmented that the subject was hard to find.
5. Build back up. In Synthetic Cubism, from 1912, they assembled pictures from bigger, simpler shapes, and began to glue in real things. Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning of 1912 includes a piece of oilcloth printed to look like chair caning, framed with rope: the first Cubist collage.

The Tate sums up why this mattered: by showing different viewpoints at once and stressing the flatness of the canvas, Cubism broke with the tradition of creating the illusion of real space from a fixed point. Many later abstract styles start from it.

How do you read Guernica?

Guernica is a worked example of reading a painting, because what it shows and what it doesn't are equally deliberate.

The event. On 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, aircraft of Nazi Germany's Condor Legion and Fascist Italy's air force, supporting Franco's Nationalist rebels, bombed Guernica, a Basque market town, for about three hours. The death toll is still disputed: the Basque government reported 1,654 dead at the time, while later local research identified about 150 named victims. Picasso, who had been asked by the Spanish Republic months earlier for a mural for its pavilion at the Paris International Exposition, read eyewitness reports and saw newspaper photographs, and changed his subject.

The making. He painted it in about 35 days, from 1 May to 4 June 1937, on a canvas 349.3 by 776.6 cm, according to the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, which holds it. The photographer Dora Maar, his partner at the time, found the studio and photographed the painting as it changed.

What to look for.

• No color. Only black, white and gray, like the newspaper photographs through which most of the world saw the war.
• No bombers. There is no plane, no pilot and no town you can identify. The museum notes that the painting contains no allusion to a specific event, and works instead as a general plea against war's terror.
• A pyramid of suffering. The figures build up toward the center, a structure borrowed from old history paintings.
• The figures. On the left, a mother screams over a dead child, an echo of paintings of Mary holding Christ. A bull looks on. In the center, a horse with a spear wound screams. A soldier lies dismembered at the bottom, holding a broken sword from which a small flower grows. From a window, a woman thrusts in a lamp; above, a bare bulb glares like an eye.
• Cubist means. Faces are flattened and twisted, seen from front and side at once, so the technique of the guitar and the wine glass now carries terror.

What the bull and horse mean, Picasso refused to say: "this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse," he told an interviewer. Critics have read the bull as Franco, as Spain, or as brute force, and the horse as the people. The painting toured to raise money for Spanish refugees, then stayed at New York's Museum of Modern Art, by Picasso's wish, until democracy returned to Spain. It arrived in Madrid in 1981, after his death and Franco's, and has been at the Reina Sofía since 1992. It is still the image people reach for to protest the bombing of civilians, and it belongs to a decade when fascism was spreading across Europe.

How did he treat the women in his life?

Badly, by the accounts of several who knew him well, and the evidence is now part of how he is discussed. He met Marie-Thérèse Walter in 1927, when she was 17 and he was 45. The painter Françoise Gilot, his partner from 1943 to 1953, described in her 1964 memoir Life with Picasso a controlling and often cruel man; she reports him saying "women are machines for suffering." His granddaughter Marina Picasso's 2001 memoir is harsher still. His biographer John Richardson, who knew him, called work, sex and tobacco his addictions.

Still argued

How much his treatment of women should shape how his art is seen is argued. Some critics hold that the art must be judged on its own, and that the women's portraits are among its greatest achievements. Others argue that the violence done to women in the life shows in the distorted, possessive images of them, and that museums should say so. In 2023, the 50th anniversary of his death, exhibitions such as one at the Brooklyn Museum took up that critique directly. Both sides agree on his importance; they disagree on what to make of it.

Why does he matter?

Because after Picasso, a painting no longer had to look like a view through a window. Cubism opened the door to abstraction, collage brought everyday material into art, and his constant reinvention made the idea of an artist with many styles normal. To see where his break began, compare the patient illusionism of the Mona Lisa and the expressive color of Van Gogh; for why a guitar of cut paper counts as art at all, see what art is.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: name three of Picasso's periods in order, and what changed in each.
• Explain in your own words how a Cubist would paint a glass, and why that breaks with Renaissance perspective.
• Why does Guernica show no planes or bombs, and what does it show instead?

Sources

• Cubism — Tate
• Guernica, Pablo Picasso, 1937 — Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
• Pablo Picasso — Wikipedia
• Guernica (Picasso) — Wikipedia
• Bombing of Guernica — Wikipedia