Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973) is universally recognised as one of the most important and influential artists of modern art. Endless pages have been written about his life, and so many have tried to analyse his style and his thinking that attempting to sum it all up in a few lines would be pointless.

I would like not to dwell on my personal opinions, but going beyond the academic study of the artist and into his personal life, I came across anecdotes that tell of a macho Picasso, violent and ruthless towards women, the many women he met along his way. Every story has more than one side to hear, but as Fernand Braudel teaches, the history of men must also be analysed through the whole set of situations and conditions that favoured or provoked the course of that history at the moment it happened.

Who knows what kind of man Picasso would have been, and what life he would have had, if he had been born a century later, at the turn of the millennium. We cannot know, so I prefer to dwell on the beautiful things:

I prefer to tell how, so the story goes, the first word of Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso was piz, piz, short for lápiz (pencil). I like to imagine that this is the origin of the wonder that, in any case, this incredible artist created.

He became famous in the first decade of the 1900s for founding Cubism together with Georges Braque and other artists, one of the first artistic movements of modern art, which would develop not only in painting but also in literature and music.

He was an extremely prolific artist, varied in his research and always engaged socially and politically too.
A striking example is his famous work Guernica, painted in just two months after the dramatic bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.

The work, which tells of the piercing devastation of war, was shown in the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, confirming Picasso as one of the most engaged artists of the century.