Pablo Ruiz Picasso entered the world in Málaga, the son of a painter and drawing instructor who recognized his son's talent early. By his teens Picasso was already outpacing his own father's technical skill, and he would go on to co-found Cubism, produce Guernica, and leave behind an estimated 50,000 artworks across an astonishingly varied career spanning eight decades.
Family legend holds that the midwife thought the newborn was stillborn until his uncle, exhaling cigar smoke into the infant's face, provoked a cry of protest. His full baptismal name ran to nearly two dozen words honoring saints and relatives, though he would settle on the single surname of his mother, Picasso, considering it more distinctive than his father's, Ruiz.
His father, José Ruiz y Blasco, taught art and reportedly handed his own brushes to his son as a teenager after concluding the boy had already surpassed him. Picasso entered Barcelona's School of Fine Arts at 13, skipping entrance exams meant for far older students, and completed them in a single day.
Over a career that moved through Blue and Rose periods, into Cubism with Georges Braque, and eventually to the anguished protest of Guernica in 1937, Picasso remained restlessly inventive into his nineties, producing paintings, sculpture, ceramics, and prints. He died in 1973 having reshaped what art could look like more thoroughly than perhaps any single figure of his century.