Pablo Picasso: Discover His True History & The Most Famous Picasso Paintings

Pablo Picasso was a legend in his own time and beyond.

Born in 1881 in Málaga, Spain, Pablo Picasso was a revolutionary Spanish artist who co-founded the Cubism art movement and created thousands of masterpieces across multiple media, becoming one of the most influential and famous artists of the 20th century. He had a prolific career and continued making art until his death in the Provence region of France in 1973.

All told, some 50,000 artworks are attributed to Picasso; their diversity is so apparent that his output easily divides into distinct periods. His Blue Period (1901–1904), Rose Period (1904–1906), Cubist Period (1909–1919), and Surrealist Period (1925–1937) mark his most influential contributions to modern art. But his African Art and Proto-Cubist Period (1906–1909), as well as his Late Period works (1939–1973), call for more than an honorable mention.

Picasso once said, "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."

Uncover the life and legacy of Pablo Picasso and his famous paintings that speak to the artist in all of us.

10 Fun Facts About Pablo Picasso

• First word was "pencil." According to his mother, his first word as a baby was "piz," short for "lápiz" (pencil in Spanish). Art came first.
• Picasso's full name: Picasso's full name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso. This 23-word title included saints' and relatives' names, which was common in Spain at the time.
• Drew before walking. Picasso could draw before he could walk, but we don't know if that's really true. He was celebrated for his first painting at age 9, so a prodigy nonetheless.
• Created non-stop. He wasn't just a painter. Picasso made sculptures, ceramics, stage designs, poetry, and plays, too.
• Accused of stealing the Mona Lisa. Picasso was tried in court for stealing the Mona Lisa in 1911. He didn't, but the suspicion arose when a friend confessed to selling stolen Iberian sculptures to Picasso.
• The napkin story. Allegedly, Picasso once paid for a meal at a restaurant with a sketch done on a napkin. Like the story of van Gogh's ear, the details here are hard to verify.
• Pet lover. Picasso kept many animals. Dogs, cats, a monkey, an owl, a goat, and doves lived with him.
• 8 unique periods. Picasso's work has been categorized into at least 8 periods, including the Blue Period, Rose Period, and Cubist Period.
• Never returned to Spain. Pablo Picasso went to Spain for the last time in 1934 and vowed not to return under Francisco Franco's dictatorial regime. He never made it back in his lifetime.
• Last words were "Drink to me." Picasso passed away at 91. A toast he gave at dinner with friends before his passing are remembered as his final words.

Pablo Picasso's Early Life and Education 

Pablo Picasso was born in 1881 to José Ruiz Blasco, an art professor, and María Picasso López, both of whom encouraged Picasso’s creative pursuits from the cradle. Whether due to his father's teachings or his mother's encouragement, Picasso, even before he could talk, demonstrated remarkable artistic skill.

When he turned 14, he enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona (La Llotja). Dissatisfied with the school’s focus on classical techniques, he relocated to Madrid to study at the Royal Academy of San Fernando. Here too, he found the curriculum confining and preferred to spend days at Madrid's museums—especially the Prado—where he studied Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and El Greco, and made copies of their masterworks.

Pablo Picasso's Most Famous Works

Self-Portrait (1901) – A Glimpse into Picasso's Early Style 

Picasso's Self-Portrait marks the beginning of his Blue Period.

Self-Portrait (1901) shows Picasso in an oversized black coat, his cheeks sunken, staring into some faraway distance invisible to the viewer. The painting's lack of adornment underscores Picasso's dire emotional state.

The somber tone of this painting and the subsequent period came at one of Picasso's lowest moments. After returning to Paris from a trip, he learned that Carles Casagemas, a poet and close friend of Picasso, had committed suicide. Historic records tell a story of attempting to murder Germaine Gargallo with a pistol after she repeatedly rejected his romantic interest before turning the weapon on himself.

Picasso was profoundly disturbed by Casagemas’s death. His mournful, melancholic feelings boiled over and gave rise to what became known as his Blue Period.

Reflecting Post-Impressionist influences, Picasso translated the intensity of Post-Impressionism into atmospheric works featuring the color blue. As Picasso wielded it, blue represents complex emotions like coldness and destructive spiritual longing, and is the backdrop for depicting the hollowness of social conventions.

The Old Guitarist (1903) – The Blue Period's Melancholy

Another iconic piece from Picasso's Blue Period, The Old Guitarist (1903), depicts an emaciated musician hunched over his instrument. The mournfulness of the work is communicated by the monochromatic blue palette, which tells a story of poverty, isolation, and despair.

Is the man holding the guitar a street performer? A maestro down on his luck? It's not unlikely Picasso saw something of himself in this man. The man’s thin figure, whose elongated torso recalls El Greco's work from the Spanish Renaissance, suggests a commitment to some invisible ideal—even if he has to labor against his body to obtain it.

X-rays have revealed figures beneath the surface of the painting, which means Picasso painted over them. Reusing canvas this way points to his struggles to support himself during this period, further emphasizing the despair that hallmarks the Blue Period.

La Vie (1903) – A Symbolic Work from the Blue Period

Picasso's La Vie (1903) is a densely symbolic masterwork full of interconnected details that give the painting a narrative-like feeling. The story—or stories—suggested by these details invite contradictory interpretations, and art historians still debate how the symbolism should be deciphered.

In the foreground, a naked couple faces a mother holding a child. Behind them are two additional paintings: one showing a different couple, the other an isolated crouching nude, not unlike the woman in Vincent van Gogh’s drawing Sorrow (1882).

The male figure in the foreground resembles Picasso's deceased friend, Casagemas. This shows that the death of his close friend haunted Picasso’s reflections on life, poverty, and despair.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) – The Birth of Cubism 

Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) depicts five female nudes, whose faces and physical contours were inspired by his study of African art. The angular rendering of the figures deviated from known European painting traditions—not only in the representation of space, but in the way bodies seem intentionally distorted.

This painting, which even disturbed some of Picasso's friends and colleagues, is today considered a forerunner to Cubism. Particularly in its abandonment of traditional perspective, it signalled an important shift to a new period in modern art.

Three Musicians (1921) – Synthetic Cubism at Its Peak 

While Analytic Cubism broke down perception into geometric fragments, Three Musicians (1921) exemplifies the collage-like layering that was a hallmark of Synthetic Cubism. The work features three musicians—likely stand-ins for Picasso himself (the harlequin) and people he knew (possibly including Casagemas as Pierrot).

The use of bright, flat planes of color with sharp edges makes the figures still recognizable, however abstracted. Picasso’s borrowing of characters from Italian theatre might point back to the time he spent with the Ballets Russes some years prior. Either way, Three Musicians demonstrates the malleability of Cubism and how its analytic tendencies could be reversed to create works of equal allure, value, and impact.

There are two versions of this piece. One is on display in the MoMA in New York, the other in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Girl Before a Mirror (1932) – Reflections Aren't What They Seem

Picasso's portrait of his young lover and muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, presents a dual image. The girl’s reflection in the mirror doesn’t display her actual features as depicted in the painting, but shows something darker and more abstract.

While Girl Before a Mirror could be interpreted as commentary on youth and aging, Picasso may also have intended to suggest how a person matures into seeing themselves more abstractly, the more they “reflect” on themselves. Determining the meaning behind abstract art is subjective, so there's no one "right" answer here.

Although the painting shows clear influences of Surrealism, Picasso was never an official member of the Surrealist movement. Rather, he was a fellow traveler who sympathized with many of their ideas concerning art and life.

Woman with a Flower (1932) – A Tribute to Marie-Thérèse Walter

Another portrait of his young mistress and muse, Woman with a Flower (1932), retains as much of Picasso's Cubist inventiveness as it does the otherworldly qualities of Surrealism. This painting forms part of a broader body of work—including sculptures, drawings, and prints—created during Picasso’s so-called annus mirabilis, or “miraculous year.” Nearly all of these works were, in some way, inspired by Marie-Thérèse Walter.

In Woman with a Flower, Walter is represented as a nearly unidentifiable form that almost overwhelms the picture plane. While his use of soft, bright colors reflects his state of happiness in love, certain details suggest underlying tensions in his relationship with Marie-Thérèse. Even by the standards of prewar Paris, their age gap raised eyebrows—and Picasso was married.

So when he paints a flower piercing his mistress’s hand, radiating ripples which she seems to absorb, he’s not merely blending abstraction with a recognizable human form. He’s hinting at the emotional strain placed on a young woman expected to embody his ideals of youth, vitality, and renewal.

Guernica (1937) – A Powerful Anti-War Statement 

Guernica (1937) is a monumental painting (11 feet tall and 25 feet wide) created in response to Francisco Franco's bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. It's often considered a transitional work from his personal and romantic paintings of Walter to concerns more in line with the political world at large.

Commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair, the painting abandons the rounded, somewhat playful forms found in Picasso’s paintings of Walter and opts for a jagged, Cubist style rendered in stark blacks, whites, and greys. The painting's haunting symbolism is interpreted as reflecting the horrors of war: a screaming woman, a bull, a horse, a single light bulb, a broken sword.

Guernica quickly became an iconic anti-war masterpiece. In fact, the work was so politically charged that it remained at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until 1981, only returning to Spain after the political tensions surrounding Franco’s death had finally subsided. It's rightfully considered one of the most famous paintings in the world.

The Weeping Woman (1937) – Emotional Turmoil and Tragedy

Often considered a sort of postscript to Guernica, The Weeping Woman (1937) focuses on the motif of a grieving woman driven to the brink of despair by the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Based on the likeness of Dora Maar, who, as Picasso’s muse and fellow artist, brought him around to exploring more political subjects in his work, the painting features a particularly fractured and jagged brand of Cubism. Only here, in contrast with the monochromatic severity of Guernica, vivid colors are set within planes of geometric shapes.

While Guernica portrayed the immediate shock and brutality of war, The Weeping Woman—part of a series exploring the theme of female grief during wartime—centers on the tears of mourning that follow in the aftermath. In this light, the work offers a powerful depiction of raw emotion and pushes the limits of Cubist technique to articulate authentic human sorrow.

Dora Maar au Chat (1941) – A Portrait of His Muse 

Picasso's Dora Maar au Chat (1941) depicts his lover and muse at the time, Dora Maar, seated in a way that evokes a queen or royal figure. The faceted planes and blocks of colour that sculpt her body don't seem to affect the small cat perched beside her head.

While some critics have suggested that the angular features of Picasso's sitter reflect their turbulent relationship, it's just as likely that the painting alludes to conversations he and Maar shared on the subject of Cubism and its capacity to represent reality.

Picasso often referred to Maar as his "Afghan cat," and notably, the cat in the painting remains untouched by Cubist distortion. Maar once said about Picasso's numerous portraits of her: "All his portraits of me are lies. They're all Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar." Even so, the painting demonstrates Picasso’s continued commitment to Cubist technique. In 2006, Dora Maar au Chat became one of the most expensive paintings ever sold—setting a record-breaking auction price of $95.2 million.

Picasso's Artistic Periods and Styles 

Picasso’s works can be grouped into several major periods. Among the most significant are his Blue Period (1901–1904), Rose Period, early experiments in Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and later developments in Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919).

Many of his subsequent periods—including his Surrealist and Neoclassical phases—revisited themes and techniques first explored during his Blue and Rose Periods, when Post-Impressionism influenced him to work in somber shades of blue or, later, in warmer tones depicting circus performers and harlequins.

Of course, Cubism never left him once he had discovered it. Moving beyond the geometric fragmentation of Analytic Cubism and the collage-like constructions of Synthetic Cubism, Picasso used the language of Cubism to explore the full gamut of human experience—love, horror, dejection, war, poverty—as no artist had before or since.

In his later years, he simplified his style further, creating a kind of late-period Cubism infused with his own personal mythology, producing some of his most intimate and expressive works.

Timeline of Picasso's Artistic Periods

• Blue Period (1901–1904) - Dominated by somber blue tones reflecting his depression and poverty, featuring melancholic subjects like beggars, prisoners, and mourners.
• Rose Period (1904–1906) - Characterized by warmer pink and orange hues with circus performers and harlequins as frequent subjects, showing his improved mood and circumstances.
• African Period (1907–1909) - Heavily influenced by African tribal masks and Iberian sculpture, developing more angular and abstract representations that laid groundwork for Cubism.
• Analytic Cubism (1909–1912) - Broke subjects down into geometric forms viewed from multiple perspectives simultaneously, using limited color palettes of browns, greys, and blacks.
• Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919) - Incorporated collage elements and found objects into paintings, using brighter colors and simpler shapes with flatter, more decorative compositions.
• Neoclassical Period (1918–1925) - Returned to more traditional representation with massive, weighty classical figures inspired by Mediterranean antiquity and his travels to Italy.
• Surrealism (1925–1935) - Created distorted, dreamlike works with fluid forms and symbolic elements expressing the unconscious mind and intense emotional states.
• War and Postwar Period (1935–1945) - Produced politically charged works like "Guernica" responding to the Spanish Civil War and WWII with powerful, anguished imagery.
• Later Works (1945–1973) - Experimented freely across styles, including pottery, sculpture, and printmaking, often reinterpreting works by old masters with childlike spontaneity and creative freedom.

Discovering Wall Art Inspired by Picasso's Style

Let Picasso influence your choice of contemporary wall art—doing so opens a vibrant world of creativity and reinterpretation. You can find pieces that embrace Pablo Picasso's visual language, using bold colors and abstract forms.

If You Like Picasso’s Blue Period, Look for Pieces With…

• Cool, Monochromatic Color Palettes
• Artworks that use shades of blue, teal, and grey evoke the same emotional depth as Picasso’s Blue Period.
• Minimal color contrast enhances the feeling of melancholy and introspection.
• Expressive, Elongated Figures
• Many Blue Period paintings, such as The Old Guitarist and La Vie, feature stretched, gaunt figures that emphasize emotion and vulnerability.
• Look for modern or classic portraits with soft brushstrokes and fluid, organic lines that reflect this style.
• Themes of Solitude and Reflection
• Picasso’s subjects often appear alone, lost in thought, or in deep contemplation.
• Abstract or figurative paintings depicting solitary individuals, musicians, or quiet urban scenes can create a similar mood.
• Soft, Diffused Lighting
• Many Blue Period works have a dreamlike, hazy quality, as if viewed through mist or twilight.
• Seek pieces with gentle gradients, soft shading, or Impressionist-style brushwork to achieve the same effect.
• Symbolic and Emotional Storytelling
• Art that conveys melancholy, longing, or human struggle without explicitly defining a narrative is ideal.
• Expressionist works with minimalistic yet powerful compositions can mimic the emotional weight of this period.

Whether you’re drawn to the subdued beauty of Picasso’s Blue Period or its emotional depth, incorporating similar art into your space can create a serene, introspective, and deeply meaningful aesthetic.

If You Like the Cubist Style, Look for Pieces With…

• Geometric Shapes and Fragmented Forms
• Look for modern-style art with overlapping rectangles, triangles, and abstracted shapes that break down objects into their essential forms.
• Pieces that deconstruct faces, still lifes, or cityscapes into angular compositions will closely resemble the Cubist approach.
• Multiple Perspectives in One Composition
• Cubist paintings often depict several viewpoints simultaneously, creating a unique visual experience.
• Search for art that plays with layering, distorted perspectives, and abstract facial features to mimic this effect.
• Earthy or Monochromatic Color Palettes
• Many early Analytical Cubist works use muted tones like brown, grey, and ochre, allowing the focus to remain on structure.
• Later Synthetic Cubist works embrace brighter colors and collage-like elements, making them ideal for bold statement pieces.
• Sharp, Angular Lines and Bold Contrasts
• Unlike softer abstract styles, Cubism thrives on sharp, precise lines and well-defined edges.
• Opt for works with contrasting color blocks, strong diagonal lines, and high-energy compositions to replicate the Cubist feel.

By incorporating Cubist-inspired art into your home, you can create a space that feels dynamic, intellectual, and visually stimulating, capturing the bold essence of modern abstraction.

If You Like Picasso’s Surrealist-Inspired Works, Look for Pieces With…

• Dreamlike, Abstracted Figures
• Surrealist art often distorts reality, so look for elongated or exaggerated human forms that break away from traditional proportions.
• Portraits with mismatched facial features or asymmetry can mirror Picasso’s approach in works like The Weeping Woman (1937).
• Unusual or Symbolic Compositions
• Surrealist art frequently places objects and figures in unexpected arrangements.
• Look for paintings where human figures morph into animals, objects float, or faces merge with landscapes.
• Bright, Unnatural Colors
• Unlike his Cubist works, Picasso’s Surrealist phase featured bold, high-contrast colors that amplified the emotional intensity.
• Art with vivid, surreal color palettes (such as electric blues, deep reds, or neon yellows) can create a similar effect.
• Expressive and Chaotic Energy
• Picasso’s Surrealist portraits often appear emotionally charged, fragmented, or unsettling.
• Seek abstract expressionist works that use bold brushstrokes, spontaneous lines, or mixed media techniques to convey raw emotion.

If you love Picasso’s dreamlike, bizarre, and highly expressive Surrealist works, consider looking for wall art that evokes similar themes. This mid-century style is once again trending, so you may be able to find up-and-coming artists to add to your collection.

Picasso's Legacy & Influence 

Even apart from his celebrity, Picasso remains an excellent painter by any standard. Not only did he (along with Georges Braque) fundamentally change the course of modern art through Cubism, but he constantly reinvented himself and his work—all the while pioneering the then-radical concept that art could be non-representational. Later modern art periods like Abstract Expressionism and Contemporary Art could not have been accomplished without Picasso's influence.

Numerous art movements shaped the wide-ranging techniques and styles Picasso developed across his career, and, in turn, these movements were mutually influenced by his contributions. His Surrealist Period provides just one instance of this; his works also reflect Neoclassical and Constructivist influences.

Picasso’s most famous paintings have a cachet that sometimes obscures their value as art. The fact that a painting like Dora Maar au Chat can set new auction highs has as much to do with prestige as a genuine desire to understand what makes this painting so absorbing to look at and think about.

All the same, students and scholars, critics and connoisseurs are indebted to institutions that celebrate Picasso’s legacy, his influence, and the lasting appeal he holds for artists working today. Major museums dedicated to Picasso’s work include the Museo Picasso in Barcelona, the Musée Picasso in Paris, the Museo Picasso Málaga (located at Picasso’s birthplace), and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, which houses one of the largest public Picasso collections. These spaces underscore Picasso’s inestimable value for contemporary art collections.