Pablo Ruiz y Picasso Pablo Picasso, born in a poor family in southern Spain in 1881, started as a child prodigy and ended as the acknowledged greatest painter of his century. After some early training with his father, a provincial drawing teacher, Picasso showed that he had thoroughly grasped naturalistic conventions--the ways that artists make a picture look "realistic"--at a very young age. After some incomplete sessions of art school in Barcelona and Madrid, Picasso …showed first 75 words of 660 total…

…showed last 75 words of 660 total…papers and other such detritus of the metropolis, which had never before been satisfactorily incorporated into the visual arts. Picasso made valuable contributions to art throughout his entire life, but it was the invention of Cubism that secured his immortality. His later work, in a proliferation of styles, from Surrealist to neo-classical, shows that his artistic vitality transcends any one style. Remarkably prolific, no single technique or medium could contain the artist's apparently boundless energy.