Spanish painter , sculptor , draughtsman , printmaker , decorative artist and writer , active in France. He dominated 20th-century European art and was central in the development of the image of the modern artist. Episodes of his life were recounted in intimate detail, his comments on art were published and his working methods recorded on film.
Painting was his principal medium, but his sculptures, prints, theatre designs and ceramics all had an impact on their respective disciplines. Even artists not influenced by the style or appearance of his work had to come to terms with its implications. With Georges Braque Picasso was responsible for Cubism, one of the most radical re-structurings of the way that a work of art constructs its meaning. During his extremely long life Picasso instigated or responded to most of the artistic dialogues taking place in Europe and North America, registering and transforming the developments that he found most fertile.
His marketability as a unique and enormously productive artistic personality, together with the distinctiveness of his work and practice, have made him the most extensively exhibited and discussed artist of the 20th century.
His earliest preserved drawings, produced as a child of nine, display a precocious grasp of naturalistic conventions. Picasso, and conventional academic studies e. Picasso, In he produced about 15 oil portraits both of family friends and of socially marginal types which sympathetically present the sitter, for example Girl with Bare Feet ; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 2. Picasso, , which emulated the subject-matter of popular political journals of the time. In September, aged only 14, Picasso passed the examinations to enter the senior course in classical art and still-life.
During the next few years he began to assert his independence, attending the academy only irregularly. The First Communion ; Barcelona, Mus.
