At the time of Pablo Picasso’s birth, his father, an academic painter, taught art at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios in Málaga and was also an art restorer at the local museum. In 1891, the family was in La Coruña, where his father taught at the college, and Pablo took lessons at the Da Guarda Art School. Encouraging his son’s precocious talent, Picasso’s father passed on his academic knowledge, and at about the age of 12, Pablo painted his first canvases, which he signed ‘Pablo Ruiz’. In 1895, when Picasso was 14 years old, the family moved to Barcelona, and he entered the Escuela de Bellas Artes de la Lonja. During the winter of 1897–1898, he attended the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. Back in Barcelona in 1899, he was a regular at Els Quatre Gats, a café popular with intellectual and artistic youth, including two future close friends, the painter Carles Casagemas (1880–1901) and the poet Jaime Sabartés.

On his first trip to Paris in 1900, where he caught up with his friend, the painter Isidro Nonell, Picasso barely associated with anyone outside the Spanish community. Nonetheless, Berthe Weill bought one of his paintings, and in 1901, Ambroise Vollard held an exhibition of his racecourse and bar scenes. From then on, he signed his works with his mother’s surname, Picasso. At the end of 1901, he returned to Spain, only to go back to Paris at the end of 1902. He left for Spain at the beginning of 1903 and remained there for a year. When he then returned to Paris, he set himself up in one of the studios in the wooden house at number 13 in the old Rue Ravignon, nicknamed the ‘Maison du Trappeur’ (Trapper’s House) and later renamed the ‘Bateau-Lavoir’ (Washhouse) by Guillaume Apollinaire. For several years he lived there with Fernande Olivier, who often modelled for him and who also began to paint. At that time Montmartre was the hub of the arts and attracted people from all over the world. It was there that Picasso met Max Jacob and later Kees van Dongen, André Salmon, and Apollinaire, as well as Henri Matisse in 1906 and André Derain and Georges Braque in 1907. In Picasso’s studio, he and his friends mischievously but affectionately organised a banquet in honour of the Le Douanier (Henri Rousseau) in 1908. After Picasso sold his first works to the Russian art collector Sergei Shchukin in 1908–1909, he could put the years of great material difficulty behind him. His so-called Blue, Rose, and Negro (or ‘African’) periods ended with the development of Analytical Cubism, which was to preoccupy him from 1910 until war broke out in 1914. He stayed in Cadaqués with Derain and in Céret with Braque in 1910, with Juan Gris in 1911, and in Sorgues (Vaucluse) with Braque in 1912. The young art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler secured exclusive rights to Picasso’s works in 1912. After 1912, Picasso and everyone who painted or wrote in Montmartre migrated to Montparnasse. With the outbreak of World War I, however, the community disintegrated.

When the war started in 1914, Picasso was in Avignon. He travelled to Italy in 1917 and associated with Jean Cocteau, Serge Diaghilev, Léonide Massine, Igor Stravinsky, and Erik Satie in Rome. Standing in for the absent poet-turned-soldier Apollinaire, Diaghilev, director of the Ballets Russes, commissioned sets and costumes from Picasso for the ballet Parade written by Cocteau and with music by Satie. The performance of the ballet in Paris caused quite a stir. In 1917, Ivan Aksionov’s book on Picasso was published in Moscow. Picasso fell in love with the dancer Olga Kokhlova, whom he married in 1918. They had a son, Paulo, in 1921. The marriage broke up in 1934 but they never divorced. From 1919 to 1924, he created more sets, costumes, and curtains for productions of Manuel de Falla’s The Three-cornered Hat ( El Sombrero de Tres Picos) and Stravinsky’s Pulcinella by the Ballets Russes. The period from 1928 to 1929 when he was living in Dinard became known as the ‘Dinard’ period. In 1933 and 1934, he paid two lengthy visits to Spain, after which the Minotaur theme started to develop. At the beginning of the 1930s, his personal life inspired a large number of portraits of his mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who gave birth to a daughter in 1935. Following the outbreak of the Civil War in Spain in 1936, the subsequent nationalist victory, and the Franco era, Picasso never again returned to Spain. During this period dominated by the creation of Guernica, he lived with Dora Maar in Paris. He was living in Royan in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II and afterwards spent the years from 1940 to 1944, the entire period of German occupation, in Paris. His 1945 play Desire Caught by the Tail ( Le Désir attrapé par la queue) describes some of the hardships of this period.

After the war, Picasso settled in the south of France. Unless they appeared in his work, the names of his companions are unimportant, apart from Françoise Gilot, by whom he had two children, Claude and Paloma. For several months in 1946, he worked in the rooms of the Château Grimaldi, which was later to become the first Musée Picasso. For several years after 1948, he was mainly active in Vallauris where, through his own work and dynamic presence, he rejuvenated the local ceramic craft industry. In 1953, he separated from Françoise Gilot, and, in 1955, moved to Cannes, where he lived in the villa La Californie and bought the Château de Vauvenargues in 1958. His wife Olga Kokhlova had died in 1955, and he married again in 1958. His new wife was Jacqueline Roque, whom he had met in 1954. The couple settled in Mas Notre-Dames-de-Vie in Mougins in 1961. He spent his remaining years in Mougins, painting several canvases a day until his death in 1973 at the age of 92.

While painting constitutes the major part of his work, the quantity of drawings, engravings, and sculptures is also impressive, all the more so as they reveal the same abundance of creative genius. Thousands of drawings and brush washes (more than 20,000) accompanied the progress of his work throughout his career, and often series of them ran parallel to series of paintings. From 1904 to 1905, Picasso engraved a series of etchings and drypoints, corresponding to his Rose period, of which the 14 copper plates were bought by Ambroise Vollard, who published them in 1913 under the title Acrobats ( Saltimbanques). Throughout his life he produced a considerable quantity of prints, but mention should be made of the Minotauromachy of 1935, the Dream and Lie of Franco ( Sueño y Mentira de Franco) series, and the Vollard Suite of 1937.

With regard to his work as an illustrator of literary works and the albums he designed, Patrick Cramer and Luc Monod list more than 100 works either fully or partially illustrated by Picasso, including André Salmon’s Poems ( Poèmes, 1905); Apollinaire’s Alcools (1908); the four etchings (corresponding to his Analytical Cubist period) in Max Jacob’s St-Matorel (1911); Jacob’s Siege of Jerusalem ( Le Siège de Jérusalem, 1914); Jacob’s The Dice Cup ( Le Cornet à dés, 1917); Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1918); Salmon’s The Manuscript Found in a Hat ( Le Manuscrit trouvé dans un chapeau, 1919); Pierre Reverdy’s Hangman’s Ropes ( Cravates de chanvre, 1922); André Billy’s The Life of Apollinaire ( Apollinaire vivant, 1922); 30 ‘Classical’ etchings for Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1931); 13 etchings and woodcuts (corresponding to his Neo-Classical period) for Honoré de Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece ( Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, 1932); Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (1934); Paul Éluard’s The Safety Rail ( La Barre d’appui, 1936); Éluard’s Fertile Eyes ( Les Yeux fertiles, 1936); Comte de Buffon’s Natural History ( Histoire naturelle, 1942); Georges Hugnet’s Honeysuckle ( La Chèvre-feuille, 1943); Robert Desnos’ Contrée (1944); Éluard’s To Pablo Picasso ( À Pablo Picasso, 1944); Apollinaire’s The Breasts of Tiresias ( Les Mamelles de Tirésias, 1946); Ramón Reventos’ Two Tales; Luis de Góngora’s Twenty Poems (1948); Iliazd’s Escrito (1948); Reverdy’s Song of the Dead ( Le Chant des morts, 1948); Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen (1949); Aimé Césaire’s Lost Body ( Corps perdu, 1950); Tristan Tzara’s In Living Memory ( De Mémoire d’homme, 1950); Éluard’s The Face of Peace ( Le Visage de la paix, 1951); Denis Diderot’s Mystification (1954); Picasso’s own Poems and Lithographs ( Poèmes et lithographies, 1954); Tzara’s À Haute Flamme (1955); Roch Grey’s Midnight Horses ( Chevaux de minuit, 1956); Jacob’s Chronical of Heroic Times ( Chronique des temps héroïques, 1956); Magry y Jiménez de La Espada’s The Mendicant Friar (1959); Pablo Neruda’s Toros (1960); Pindar’s VIIIe Pythique (1960); Cocteau’s Picasso (1962); Miguel Dominguin’s Toros y Toreros (1962); Douglas Cooper’s Les Déjeuners (1962); Fernand Mourlot’s Picasso the Lithographer ( Picasso lithographe, 1964); Reverdy’s Quicksand ( Sable mouvant, 1966); Cooper’s Theatre (1967); and Fernando de Rojas’ La Celestina (1971).

The work of Picasso the sculptor is equally rich, comprising more than 350 works, not counting the ceramics. Besides the movable sculptures, some monumental works were made from his models, notably a metal sculpture for Chicago’s Daley Plaza, as well as others in cement and crushed granite, such as the 26 feet (8 metres) high Sylvette for the Bowcentrum in Rotterdam. Although he started sculpting as an adolescent, the only sculpture from this early period to be kept was Seated Woman (1902), which, like Madman and Harlequin (1905), still shows Rodin’s influence, whereas Blind Singer (1903) and Woman’s Head (1906) break free from his influence. In 1906–1907, the relief mask Woman’s Head was similar in its Primitivism to Picasso’s pictures of Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon. Later on, Picasso’s sculpture would often be quite separate from his painting. The three Figures (1907), wooden totem poles summarily cut and gaudily coloured in red and white, and perhaps also the large and rustic Woman’s Head (1909–1910), still belong to the period of primitivist inspiration. With the various trimmings and real objects, the painted cardboard reliefs, such as Violins (1913–1914), Still-Life, and Glass of Absinthe (1914), together with the contemporary collages, freely but logically accompany Picasso’s paintings from the Analytical Cubism period. Several copies of Glass of Absinthe, assembled partly in wax with a real spoon, were cast in bronze, each then being painted in different colours. Picasso did not sculpt again until the four Metal Constructions of 1928–1929, when he assisted Julio González, who introduced him to working in metal and soldering. After that he continued to use this assemblage technique but often softened it by using real objects completely diverted from their function, as in Woman’s Head (1931), made up of iron colanders painted white.

Over the next decade or so, his sculptural output appeared in very different ways and with no obvious link to the paintings of the same period. Women (1931) is wooden and spindly, recalling Alberto Giacometti’s work. Other assemblages are almost precious, such as Matchsticks, Drawing Pins, Blades of Grass, Butterfly (1932); the bronze Rooster ( Coq, 1932); the strange figures in high relief, contorted and grotesque (1934); a very graceful and noble Head of a Young Girl (1941); the Skulls (1943); and the apocalyptic Rooster ( Coq, 1943). Also in 1943, he created what is undoubtedly the height of his assemblage work, Head of a Bull, also known as Saddle and Handlebars, stemming from the supposedly chance association (in so far as it is devoid of any artistic device) of a bicycle saddle and handlebars. He then frequently pursued this technique of assembling salvaged eclectic items, as in the 1943 work in which a vase, a branch, and a biscuit tin, among other things, make up Woman with an Apple. During the same period, in 1944, with Man with Sheep, Picasso revived a tradition that, if not Classical, was at least newly derived from Rodin. The Man with Sheep was later cast in bronze for a commission from the town council in Vallauris, where Picasso was living at the time. His bottle-women, head-vases, and owls revived the local pottery craft. Then followed some larger sculptures: Goat, just one copy of which was cast in bronze in 1952, ‘constructed’ from a basket with a hole in it shaping the sides, a board with nails in it, a paddle arching the spine, ribs of palms, earthenware jars, a tin can, and a length of barbed wire all assembled with plaster (1950); Little Girl Skipping and Woman with a Pram (or Pushchair) (1950); and later Female Monkey and Its Young (1952–1955). In the sculptural work can also be included the equally considerable output of Vallauris ceramics, for which reference should be made to Georges Ramié’s Picasso the Ceramist ( Picasso céramiste). Sometimes a work designed in ceramic, such as the 1948 Centaur, was eventually cast in bronze. After 1960, Picasso returned to techniques corresponding to the old cardboard reliefs and soldered metal sculptures, cutting or (apparently) simply tearing paper or cutting, folding, and painting sheet metal to make comical figures, such as Woman and Child (1961).

As far as painting is concerned, Picasso’s works as a young schoolboy evidence his obvious talent, his serious training, and an already enormous capacity for work as well as technical mastery in a Classical sense. This latter was recognised as early as 1897, when at the age of 16 he was awarded a distinction at the Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes in Madrid, followed by a gold medal at the regional exhibition in Málaga for his painting Science and Charity ( Ciencia y Caridad). In Barcelona in 1899, he began to free himself from his academic training, influenced initially by his admiration of El Greco and Goya, and later Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin. The period between 1900 and 1903, when Picasso alternated between Paris and Barcelona, corresponds with the Blue period in his paintings, marked by his recent discovery of Edgar Degas, Édouard Vuillard, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. The Rose period dates from 1904 to 1906, during Picasso’s early years in Paris. No doubt he saw the future in lighter colours. The old beggars and sickly children from the dusk of the Blue period give way to a dawn of young acrobats in Harlequin costumes and little girls on the verge of womanhood.

The beginning of the Negro period dates from the end of the Rose period and, although Picasso denied it, corresponds with contact with the first African masks acquired by Derain. In 1907, after numerous preliminary studies, 17 of which were required for the single final composition, Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, in which it is generally claimed that the foundations of Cubism can be seen. The brothel theme has only anecdotal significance, in so far as it is present only in the sketches. The distortions of the female body and the arbitrary colours are similar to the German Expressionists of Die Brücke. Innovation is seen largely in the multiplied fragmentation of the bodies viewed simultaneously from different angles. It was only in 1908 that Paul Cezanne’s Houses in Estaque ( Maisons à l’Estaque) – and, in 1909, Braque’s Landscapes of La Roche-Guyon – provoked the critics’ eloquent, ironic remarks about the ‘cubes’ to which the initial aspect of the buildings in these two series of landscapes had been geometrically reduced. After Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the figures and still-lifes painted by Picasso still referred to Cézannist geometrisation of volumes and the vertical inversion of depth, until the Horta del Ebro landscapes, which he did not paint until 1909 and in which Braque’s former cubes can be seen. Like Braque, the years known as Picasso’s Negro period were essentially dominated by the influence of Cézanne (who had two posthumous exhibitions in Paris in 1907), apart from certain variations after Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, such as Harlequin Family (1908), the geometrisation of which was a forerunner of the Cubist period proper.

It was only after 1910 that both Picasso and Braque brought their experiments to their ultimate conclusion, the ‘Analytical’ period of Cubism. The depth of painting was reduced to that of a low relief; colour was reduced to the minimum of greys and ochres. The synthesising geometrisation of forms culminated in the almost total suppression of their recognisable identity, while the breakup of these forms completed their de-identification and is generalised, as if seen through a many-sided glass prism, in which simultaneous time lags reassemble the multiplicity of viewpoints in a single figure. Analytical Cubism concentrates the painting on the constituent factors, to the exclusion of extraneous elements that do not really belong to it, in an expression that means nothing other than itself, in the same way as music. This isolation of just the formal values denies any significance to the original subject other than a pretext for variations to exalt the act of painting itself and its own means: format, lines, and the surfaces they engender, the tones that fill them with their variations, and the infinite complexity of all the possible combinations of these elements.

It was during the Analytical Cubism years that the full flowering of Cubism was reached and, along with Picasso and Braque, various other people came together with the same aesthetic ideas, but this time a little more clearly standardised. Still-life particularly lent itself to this game of equivalence, this transubstantiation of real facts into formal facts. Picasso, however, did not hesitate to move on to applying this prismatic vision to portraits, as in his Portrait of Ambroise Vollard and Portrait of D. H. Kahnweiler (1910). From the years 1911–1913, Picasso moved away from the austere monochrome of the Analytical period, notably in the series of still-lifes My Pretty ( Ma Jolie) of the short ‘Rococo’ period, in which he reintroduced bright colours into speckled planes or even blocks.

In Sorgues in 1912, the first papiers collés (paper collages) were created at the instigation of Braque. This involved the introduction of printed letters, words, and figures from documents, newspapers, wallpaper, tobacco packets, imitation wood, or real objects into the painting (then at the limit of Non-Representation), transferring them onto it and conferring on it a status of objectivity. Painting, playing the small part that it did, became an object in its own right and took on a value equal to that of the real element integrated within it. This integration of real elements into the picture is sometimes thought of as a refusal to allow Analytical Cubism to drift toward total Abstraction. In 1913–1914, extending the process of integrating real elements into the work, Picasso made his first sculpture-assemblages, which at that time were Cubist, and went on to adapt this new technique to the various periods of his subsequent development.

Declaration of war in 1914 caused the breakup of the newly created artistic community at the École de Paris and in particular the Cubist group, leaving Picasso isolated. No longer able to share in the spirituality of the Analytical Cubist community, Picasso, whose ascetic discipline was fundamentally at odds with the exuberance of his Spanish origins, progressively freed himself from Cubism during the ‘synthetic Cubism’ period, retaining only certain stylistic elements of Cubism, which were more and more diverted toward Expressionist ends. To this same end, he reintegrated colour into his works, this time almost for good. The expression ‘synthetic Cubism’ has given rise to various interpretations. It may seem hardly applicable to just Picasso and, as far as he was concerned, it ought only to be understood as abandoning strict analysis in favour of an attitude that encompasses a total synthesis of certain elements of original Cubism with a greater thematic and stylistic freedom. Reclaiming total freedom was merely a prelude to the alternation of sometimes disparate and often badly defined periods, which, overlapping and reappearing in turn, would produce the vast quantity of Picasso’s work that was to follow. In 1915–1916, he even painted a few naturalist pictures, particularly portraits of friends, such as Satie, Stravinsky, and André Breton. In 1917, when he was assisting with the ballet Parade, certain elements of his sets and particularly the main theatre curtains show a clear return to Realism, advocated moreover by Apollinaire in the programme, which took up the ideas of the manifesto New Spirit ( Esprit Nouveau), in which the word ‘surrealism’ appeared for the first time.

After this came what is known as the ‘Antique’, ‘Neo-Classical’, or even ‘Ingresque’ period, which lasted into the 1920s, when Picasso painted large nudes inspired by Roman statues that he had seen on his trip to Italy and a number of pictures of Mother and Child ( Maternités) following the birth of his son. However, at Fontainebleau in 1921, he painted two of his most important Cubist works, Three Musicians (clearly inspired by an earlier work by Henri Hayden) and Three Masks. In 1923, while painting a series of Harlequins that were still very Realist after he discovered the Italian Renaissance when he was in Italy, Picasso started the series of large still-lifes, which were exhibited in 1926 at Paul Rosenberg’s gallery and which are infinitely free and joyful variations on the themes of the new Cubists. From 1925 to 1932, and especially during the Dinard period in 1928–1929 when he was associating with the Surrealists (to whom he was more attached than to their principles), there followed several works of applied Surrealism. These were mostly female figures with monstrous anatomical distortions, through which he is believed to have expressed his disaffection for his wife, Olga, or rather his erotic obsessions and personal anguish, in which, at that time at least, there was a latent if not overt sadistic dimension. In the years that followed, the series of portraits of Marie-Thérèse Walter show women in a pleasant light again, their gentleness rediscovered.

In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques opened in Paris. For the Spanish pavilion, still created and managed at that time by the Republic, Picasso painted the immense composition Guernica in the style of a fresco, treated graphically and starkly set off by pale greys and ochres. The intention was to portray the way the Spanish people had been torn into two opposing factions and to accuse the Francoist Party of Fascist behaviour and collusion with the Nazi government. The painting was inspired by the bombing of the small Basque port of Guernica by Stukas, new German planes that were carrying out tests in preparation for the next war. In the same deflagration, an impassive and dominating Minotaur with human eyes, screaming women brandishing their murdered children, and broken horses tensed in their last breath are tangled together under the naked bulb of misery. Picasso was always opposed to Guernica being shown in Spain until it had returned to democratic government; deposited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it did not reach Spain until 1980, five years after the death of Franco.

During this period, which does not seem to have been given a particular classification but which could be called Cubo-Expressionist, Guernica was not an isolated work. Besides the many preliminary studies of details of the final composition, other paintings are connected with this expressive, dislocated representation, such as Weeping Woman ( La Femme qui pleure), Little Girl with a Lollipop ( La Petite fille à la sucette), and Seated Women ( Les Femmes assises). In addition to the movingly graceful portraits known to be of her, Dora Maar was the model for many other figures subjected to maximum deformation, some typically Cubo-Expressionist, echoing the Spanish Civil War and presaging the imminent World War II. The 1939 Night Fishing in Antibes, a composition as formally ambitious as Guernica although in a smaller format and in a totally different style, seems like a nostalgic witness of threatened happiness. The series of still-lifes exhibited at the Galerie Louis Carré in 1945 form what could be called a ‘White’ period. This series corresponds to both a mastery of harmoniously intertwining lines and the equilibrium of masses, diversified by the treatment of the material, keeping colour at the same time as symbolic anguish in themes that are funereal or taken from sordid reality: Still-Life with Ox Skull (1942) and Pitcher and Skeleton (1945).

After the war, having settled in the south of France where he created ceramics in Vallauris, Picasso painted in the then vacant Chateau Grimaldi (now known as Musée Picasso d’Antibes). He offered the museum all the works he had painted based on the legends of Greek sailors who had come to the western shores of the Mediterranean. In the rediscovered serenity of his Mediterranean retreat in the 1950s, an unexpected blossoming took place. In a series of charming works, he depicted the thousand events of his daily life with his companion of the time, Françoise Gilot, and their two young children, under the multiple aspects of a family of fauns, playing the flute, jumping in the waves, play-fighting on the beach. In this same period of happy family life, Picasso, politically committed after Guernica, expressed his convictions with Mass Grave ( Le Charnier, 1944), To the Spanish Who Died for France ( Aux Espagnols morts pour la France, 1947), and Massacres in Korea ( Les Massacres en Corée, 1951). In 1952, he completed the two large panels of War ( La Guerre) and Peace ( La Paix) for a medieval chapel in Vallauris. In 1958, he painted the very large mural painting in the Palais de l’UNESCO in Paris on a group of juxtaposed panels that could be taken apart. At the same time as painting these more memorable works, he painted a large number of landscapes, still-lifes, and portraits, including Portrait of Madame H. P. (Hélène Parmelin-Pignon) in 1952 and Portraits of Sylvette and Portraits of Jacqueline (Jacqueline Roque, his new companion) in 1954. Subsequently, in an output that was more diverse in both subject matter and technique, a significant part of Picasso’s painting was devoted to variations of famous paintings, beginning in 1950 with Gustave Courbet’s Les Demoiselles des bords de la Seine and continuing with Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers ( Les Femmes d’Alger). After the 1955–1956 Painter’s Studios in the villa La Californie in Cannes (a clear tribute to Matisse, who died in 1954), some 50 variations of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas were painted from 1956 to 1958. From 1959 to 1961, after a series of engravings of bullfights and rural scenes on linoleum in 1958–1959 and at the same time as the 1960 series of wash drawings and watercolours of Romancero of the Picador, Picasso painted 27 variations of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe at Mougins in Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie. In 1962–1963, he produced a series of Jacques-Louis David’s Rape of the Sabine Women. In 1963, he started the series of the Painter and His Model, which he continued working on until the end of his life and in which he developed an allegory of his obsession with the confused love-hate relationship between the woman and the painter. From the years between 1960 and his death in 1973, more than 1,000 paintings, prints, and drawings have been listed. At nearly 90, he was still energetically creating a series of paintings or drawings full of joy, with the atmosphere of a Spanish fiesta, ironic self-portraits of an old man or a plumed musketeer, the most common of which illustrate lively erotic intrigues and bear the most eloquent witness to his indefatigable energy.

Picasso’s vast collection of works can be divided into two dominant and antagonistic extremes: Analytical Cubism from 1910 to 1913 and the Cubo-Expressionism of Guernica from around 1937. Analytical Cubism, which is owed largely to Braque, is often linked, not without reason, to the Synthetic and Primitive Symbolism of Gauguin, the Formal Symbolism of Cézanne, and the Esoteric Symbolism of Stéphane Mallarmé, who died in 1898. With these painters, as with the poet, the apparent abstraction of the plastic or literary form does not rule out appreciable reality but deals with the basics. Almost all of Picasso’s work, apart from that of Analytical Cubism, gives the impression that such an ascetically intellectualised approach was quite contrary to his extravert temperament, and the period of hard-line Cubism, with the exception of a narrative extension, was for him very short. On the contrary, almost all his work is based, in its diversity, on Cubo-Expressionism (a term more appropriate than the more official Synthetic Cubism), which is still regarded as his own brand, his style, which, if it culminated with Guernica, was already completely present in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and which turned out to be capable of illustrating the course of his own existence, his passions, his impulses, his admirations, and his indignations throughout his life.

The scope of techniques, styles, and themes that Picasso covered remains unimaginable and incomprehensible, all the more so since no list seems to have been made of all his works in every genre. There are other artists whose output is numerically considerable, although to a lesser extent, but these artists usually continue producing more of what they know how to do. This is not the case for Picasso, even taking into account that each phase gave rise to variations on a theme and that they did not all reach the same level of intensity. It seems that throughout his very long career, he did his utmost to do what he did not previously know how to do and that, eventually, it emerged that he knew how to do everything. The total number of his works has been estimated at more than 60,000. He was admittedly fully active for 365 days a year for 75 years, but this would mean that he must have produced 800 works per year, an average of two a day.