Art Literacy Artist PABLO PICASSO 1881-1973 Spanish Painter, sculptor, printmaker Pablo Ruiz Picasso is probably the most important figure in 20th Century art. He was born in 1881 in Malaga, Spain and by the time he died in France in April of 1973, had created a staggering 22,000 works of art in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, ceramics, mosaics, stage design and graphic arts. Picasso’s artistic production is usually described in terms of a series of overlapping periods: Blue Period, Rose Period, African Period, Classic Period and Cubist Period to name a few. In one of the art history’s great collaborations, Picasso co-invented with Georges Braque the Cubist style. Cubist paintings break apart and reassemble objects in an abstracted from, highlighting their composite geometric shapes and depicting them from multiple simultaneous viewpoints. By virtue of his vast energies and overwhelming power of invention Picasso remains outstanding among the masters of the ages. While looking at his work, students learned to see abstract shapes in his paintings and then were inspired to create a portrait in the Cubist style.