Pablo Picasso Timeline

Pablo Picasso 38

1881 Pablo Picasso born in Málaga The midwife thought he was stillborn Born on 25 October 1881. An uncle revived him by blowing cigar smoke into his face — a story Picasso enjoyed telling for the rest of his life.
1891 The family moves to A Coruña His father teaches at the art school José Ruiz Blasco taught drawing and painted pigeons. He is said to have handed his brushes to his son at thirteen and never painted again.
1895 Barcelona and the Llotja Admitted at fourteen He completed the entrance examination in a day, work that was meant to take a month. The family settled in Barcelona and stayed.
1895 His sister Conchita dies Diphtheria — she was seven Picasso privately bargained that he would give up painting if she lived. She did not, and he carried the bargain as a private guilt for decades.
1897 Science and Charity Academic painting, aged fifteen A large deathbed scene with a doctor taking a pulse — his father posed for it. It won an honourable mention in Madrid and marked the end of his obedient phase.
1897 – 1898 The Royal Academy in Madrid He stops attending Picasso enrolled at San Fernando and almost immediately stopped going to classes, spending his time copying Velázquez and El Greco in the Prado instead.
1899 – 1900 Els Quatre Gats The Barcelona café that formed him A modernista tavern where Picasso held his first exhibition in 1900 and met the circle of poets and painters that included Carles Casagemas.
1900 First trip to Paris He speaks almost no French Picasso arrived for the Exposition Universelle, shared a freezing studio, and began signing his work with his mother's name rather than his father's.
1901 – 1904 Blue Period Melancholy blue paintings after friend's suicide Picasso's Blue Period (1901–1904) was triggered by the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. He painted monochromatic works in shades of blue depicting poverty, isolation and anguish — some of his most emotionally powerful works.
1901 Casagemas kills himself The event that opens the Blue Period His closest friend shot himself in a Paris café after a rejection. Picasso painted him in his coffin and turned to blue for four years.
1904 – 1911 Fernande Olivier Model and companion through Cubism She lived with him at the Bateau-Lavoir through the Rose Period and the first Cubist years, and later wrote a memoir he tried to suppress.
1904 Settles at the Bateau-Lavoir A derelict building in Montmartre No gas, one tap, studios freezing in winter. Apollinaire, Braque, Gertrude Stein and Matisse all came through it during the years Picasso worked there.
1905 – 1906 The Rose Period Acrobats, harlequins and circus families The palette warms to pinks and ochres. The saltimbanques are outsiders too, but held with a tenderness the blue paintings do not have.
1906 – 1907 Iberian carvings and African masks The Louvre, then the Trocadéro Ancient Iberian heads and an overwhelming visit to the ethnographic museum gave him the faces that break open the right side of the Demoiselles.
1906 Portrait of Gertrude Stein Around ninety sittings Picasso painted out the head and finished it from memory as a mask. Told it did not look like her, he said she would come to.
1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon The painting that broke Western art Picasso completed Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 — five nude figures with fragmented, angular forms influenced by African masks. It shocked even his closest friends and is considered the founding work of Cubism.
1908 – 1914 Cubism invented Co-created with Georges Braque Picasso and Georges Braque developed Cubism together between 1908 and 1914, fragmenting objects into multiple simultaneous viewpoints. It was the most radical reinvention of pictorial space since the Renaissance.
1909 – 1912 Analytic Cubism with Braque Roped together like mountaineers The two worked so closely that their canvases of these years are hard to tell apart. Both often left them unsigned on the front.
1911 Questioned over the stolen Mona Lisa He had bought looted Louvre statuettes Apollinaire was jailed and Picasso interrogated. He denied knowing his friend in court — a betrayal that shamed him for years.
1912 – 1915 Eva Gouel Ma Jolie — and an early death Picasso wrote her nickname into his canvases. She died of tuberculosis or cancer at thirty, and he was said to be genuinely broken by it.
1912 Still Life with Chair Caning The first collage A strip of oilcloth printed with cane, framed in rope. Once real objects entered the picture, the boundary between painting and thing stopped holding.
1914 Braque and Derain leave for the front As a Spaniard, Picasso stays He saw them off at the station and later said he never found them again. The partnership that made Cubism ended with the mobilisation.
1917 Parade Ballets Russes — designs made in Rome A collaboration with Cocteau, Satie and Diaghilev that caused a riot in Paris, and took Picasso to Italy for the first time.
1918 Marries Olga Khokhlova A dancer from the Ballets Russes The marriage brought him into wealthy Parisian society and, because he never divorced under a community-property contract, kept him legally bound to her until she died in 1955.
1925 The Three Dancers The turn toward violence A jagged, contorted dance that broke with the calm neoclassical years. The Surrealists claimed it immediately.
1927 Marie-Thérèse Walter She was seventeen — he was forty-five Picasso approached her outside a department store. The relationship was hidden for years and produced the luminous curved sleepers of the early thirties.
1935 Maya is born — Olga leaves The marriage collapses publicly The birth of his daughter by Marie-Thérèse ended the marriage. Picasso stopped painting almost entirely for a year and wrote poetry instead.
1936 – 1944 Dora Maar Photographer of Guernica in progress A Surrealist artist in her own right, she documented the painting stage by stage. Picasso called her the weeping woman and painted her that way for years.
1936 – 1939 The Spanish Civil War Named honorary director of the Prado Appointed in absentia by the Republic, Picasso never took up the post but lent his name and money to it, and never returned to Spain again.
1937 Guernica painted Response to the bombing of a Basque town Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 in response to the Nazi bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The monumental black-and-white canvas is the most powerful anti-war statement in art history.
1940 – 1944 Occupied Paris Forbidden to exhibit, he stays Picasso was harassed but never arrested. A German officer is said to have seen a photograph of Guernica and asked whether he had done it — he replied that they had.
1943 – 1953 Françoise Gilot The one who left him Forty years younger, a painter, and the mother of Claude and Paloma. She walked out in 1953 and later published a book he spent years trying to block.
1944 Picasso joins the Communist Party Political commitment after liberation of Paris Picasso joined the French Communist Party in October 1944, shortly after the liberation of Paris. He said he had been a fellow traveller for a long time. His membership caused controversy but he never resigned.
1947 – 1955 The Vallauris ceramics Thousands of plates, jugs and figures Picasso took over a struggling pottery in the south and revived the whole town's trade, working clay with the same speed he brought to everything else.
1949 The Dove of Peace A lithograph that became a global emblem Chosen as the poster for the World Peace Congress in Paris. He named the daughter born that year Paloma.
1955 – 1956 Les Femmes d'Alger series 15 variations after Delacroix Picasso painted 15 variations on Delacroix's Women of Algiers in 1954–55. Version O sold at Christie's in 2015 for $179.4 million — then the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction.
1961 Marries Jacqueline Roque His companion for the last twenty years He painted her more than four hundred times, more than any other model. They married in secret once Olga's death made it legally possible.
1973 Pablo Picasso dies at Mougins 8 April, aged ninety-one He had worked the previous evening. The estate took years to settle and produced the collections that became the Musée Picasso in Paris.