Picasso's career covers nearly the entire history of twentieth-century European painting, from the late Symbolism of his Barcelona youth through the founding of Cubism, the political mural painting of the Spanish Civil War, and the obsessive late mythologies of his eighties, and the body of work he left at his death is the largest and most stylistically various of any artist of the modern era.
Picasso came from an artistic household. His father was an academic painter and curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Málaga and at the local School of Fine Arts in A Coruña, and Picasso's earliest training was at his father's hand. By thirteen he was producing technically accomplished academic work; by fifteen he had been admitted to advanced classes at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona; by sixteen he was at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid. The early facility was so complete that the rest of his career was, in his own often-cited account, an attempt to learn to draw like a child.
His decisive move to Paris in 1900 placed him within the Montmartre avant-garde at the moment Symbolism was passing into the new century's experiments. The Blue Period that followed, the begging, mourning, and isolated figures of his Barcelona and Paris years between 1901 and 1904, was painted partly in response to the suicide of his close friend Carles Casagemas. The lighter-toned Rose Period of his early Bateau-Lavoir studio years brought him into contact with Apollinaire, Gertrude and Leo Stein, Henri Matisse, and the early Parisian collectors who would shape his subsequent career.
The painting that opened the Cubist decade was Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), the large studio canvas of five distorted female figures that combined the influences of Cézanne, Iberian sculpture, and African masks into something unlike any previous European painting. The years that followed, in close working collaboration with Braque, produced the analytic and synthetic Cubist canvases, the first papiers collés, and the development of constructed sculpture from sheet metal, cardboard, and found materials.
The interwar decades extended his vocabulary in many directions at once. He produced the Neoclassical paintings of the early 1920s, the bone-and-bather distortions of the late 1920s and 1930s influenced by his contact with Surrealism, the great Vollard Suite etchings, the political paintings around the Spanish Civil War (including Guernica, painted in six weeks in 1937 for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition), and a sustained body of portraiture, still life, and figure painting that registered the changing women in his life. He spent the Second World War in occupied Paris, refusing to leave and continuing to work.
His postwar career, mostly conducted from villas in the south of France at Vallauris, Cannes, and Mougins, produced the ceramics of his Madoura years, the sustained engagement with the great works of Old Master European painting (the Variations on Velázquez's Las Meninas, on Delacroix's Women of Algiers, on Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe), the late mythological etchings, and the sometimes savage paintings of his eighties. He died at Mougins on April 8, 1973, leaving an estate of more than 45,000 individual works that has shaped the museum landscape of modern European art ever since.