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Pablo Picasso Málaga, 1881-Mougins, 1973 As well as creating one of the first avant-garde art movements together with Braque, Picasso also invented the image of the modern artist. He is now undoubtedly considered the most important artistic personality of the twentieth century. From 1895 to 1900 Picasso lived in Barcelona where he studied at the Llotja and moved in the circle of Els Quatre Gats. After a first trip to Paris, he moved to Madrid to study at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. In 1904 he settled in Paris. From that date France became his permanent home, although he never lost his Spanish identity. Picasso lived in the legendary Bateau Lavoir in the centre of Montmartre, where he met Apollinaire, Max Jacob and André Salmon. His early Blue and Rose periods were followed by the influence of the Iberian sculpture in the Louvre and the African art which he saw in the Trocadero. In 1907 his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon opened up the way towards the avant-garde in art. From his close collaboration with Georges Braque arose Cubism, a revolutionary style which would bring to an end the traditional illusionistic system of visual representation and one whose consequences have lasted until the present day. Taking Cézanne's teachings as their starting point, both artists invented a new pictorial language based on fragmentation and simultaneity in the representation of form, the reinterpretation of objects and a severe austerity of colour (Analytical Cubism) which gradually became more abstract (Synthetic Cubism). In the period after World War I and following a trip to Italy Picasso returned to figuration and developed a type of painting with monumental figures which became known as classical and which corresponded with a general tendency towards a return to order evident in Europe after the years of avant-garde ferment. In the second half of the 1920s, influenced by Surrealism, Picasso's figures became more distorted and his subject matter gradually became more dramatic. Although he took part in the Surrealist exhibition of 1925, Picasso was never formally linked to the group. After the aerial bombing of the Basque village of Guernica, he painted a large mural that was shown in the Pavilion of the Republic of Spain during the Universal Exhibition of 1937. In the 1950s Picasso began to paint versions of works by the great masters such as Courbet, Delacroix and Velázquez. His late works deal with subjects relating to death, suffering and love, with much emphasis on expressive and emotional subjectivity, using very loose and expressionistic brushstrokes. In addition to his work as a painter, Picasso also created important sculptures, ceramics and prints, showing the same creative force in all these media as he showed in his painting. Daix, P. and Rosselet, J.: Picasso, The Cubist Years, 1907-1916: Acatalogue raisonné of the paintings and related works. New York-Boston, 1979. Daix, P. and Muñoz Molina, A.: Picasso, 1923. Arlequín con espejo y La flauta de Pan. Exhibition catalogue Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 1995 Christopher G.: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. The European Avant-gardes. Art in France and Western Europe 1904-c.1945. London, 1995. William R. (ed.): Picasso and Portraiture. Exhibition catalogue The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996.