Biography
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) is the towering figure of twentieth-century art — co-founder of Cubism and, by most reckonings, the most influential artist of the modern age. Born in Málaga to a drawing professor who recognized his gift in early childhood, he was a prodigy exhibiting mature skill as a teenager before he moved to Paris, then the art capital of the world. There he reinvented himself again and again across more than seventy years of relentless work.
Cubism, Printmaking & Ceramics
His melancholy, blue-drenched figures of the Blue Period (1901–1904) gave way to the warmer circus performers of the Rose Period (1904–1906); then, in 1907, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon shattered five centuries of perspective and opened the door to Cubism, which he built alongside Georges Braque — first the fractured "analytic" phase, then the brighter "synthetic" phase that introduced collage into fine art. He moved on through Neoclassicism in the 1920s and a Surrealist-tinged decade, and in 1937 answered the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War with Guernica, one of art's most powerful anti-war statements.
Picasso was almost unimaginably prolific — scholars estimate roughly 50,000 works across painting, sculpture, drawing, ceramics, and prints, nearly two a day for decades. For collectors, the accessible heart of his output is the graphic and ceramic work: the 100 etchings of the Vollard Suite (1930–37), his linocuts and lithographs, and the playful, hand-thrown ceramics he produced at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris from 1947, issued in numbered editions that put a genuine Picasso within reach.
Collecting & Authenticating Picasso
That output is also among the most thoroughly catalogued of any modern master, and the scholarship is what separates an authentic piece from a reproduction. His prints are referenced by Georges Bloch's catalogue ("Bloch" numbers) and, for the intaglio work, by Brigitte Baer's Picasso peintre-graveur; his lithographs by Fernand Mourlot; his paintings and drawings by Christian Zervos's monumental catalogue raisonné. The Madoura ceramics are catalogued by Alain Ramié (Picasso: Catalogue of the Edited Ceramic Works 1947–1971, 1988), and authentic Madoura editions carry impressed stamps such as "Madoura Plein Feu," "Edition Picasso," and "Empreinte Originale de Picasso." For major works, the Picasso Administration in Paris, run by the artist's heirs, is the body that issues certificates of authenticity. A Picasso tied to its catalogue number stands on firm ground; one without that reference deserves caution. He died in 1973 at Mougins in the south of France, his shadow falling across every artist who followed.