Picasso created some of the greatest 20th century paintings, several of which have achieved iconic status ( Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Guernica, Weeping Woman). The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) has been called 'the house that Pablo built,' because it has so widely exhibited the artist's work. His work in pioneering Cubism established a set of pictorial problems, devices, and approaches, which remained important well into the 1950s. Picasso's influence was profound and far-reaching for most of his life. As he matured he worked on his own versions of canonical masterpieces by artists such as Poussin, Ingres, Velazquez, Goya, Rembrandt, and El Greco. In the 1920s and 1930s Picasso adopted a neoclassical figurative style. At the same time, Picasso himself rejected the label 'Cubism,' especially when critics began to differentiate between the two key approaches he pursued - Analytic and Synthetic. This led him (alongside with Georges Braque) to evolve an entirely new Cubist movement, which rapidly became the cutting edge of modern art. Influenced by novelties of Cézanne, and also by African sculpture and ancient Iberian art, he started to lend his figures more structure, and to deconstruct the conventions of perspective that had dominated painting since the Renaissance. Picasso rejected Matisse's view of the primary importance and role of colour, and focused instead on new pictorial ways of representing form and space. His many relationships with women not only filtered into his art but also may have directed its course, and his behavior has come to embody that of the bohemian modern artist in the popular imagination.

Finally, he was a famously charismatic personality, the leading figure in the Ecole de Paris. He saw himself above all as a painter, yet his sculpture was greatly influential, and he also explored areas as diverse as printmaking and ceramics. Associated most of all with pioneering Cubism, he also invented collage and made major contribution to Surrealism.

Pablo Picasso was the most dominant and influential artist of the 1st half of the 20th century. Nevinson, Valentine Hugo, Lee Miller, Juan Gris, Jacqueline Lamba

Friends and Co-workers: Georges Braque, Constantin Brâncuși, Man Ray, Max Jacob, Amedeo Modigliani, Christopher Wood, Mykhailo Boychuk, C.

Art institution: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, Spain.

Influenced on: Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Arshile Gorky, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Robert Delaunay, Piet Mondrian, Karel Appel, Balcomb Greene, Francis Bacon, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Salvador Dali, Tamara de Lempicka, Vilhelm Lundstrom, Alan Tellez, Beauford Delaney, Russ Warren, David Chethlahe Paladin, Cubism, Surrealism, Pop Art, Conceptual Art.

Influenced by: Marc Chagall, Henri Rousseau, El Greco, Francisco Goya, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Auguste Rodin, Nicolas Poussin, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Rembrandt, Diego Velazquez, Antoine Watteau, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Matthias Grünewald.

Field: painting, sculpture, drawing, lithography, graphics.

Art Movement: Cubism, Post-Impressionism, Surrealism.

Christine Poggi is Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director and Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.Pablo Picasso Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso Olivier Berggruen is a German-American art historian and independent curator based in New York. The book ultimately examines how drawing serves as the vital thread connecting all of Picasso’s art. Some of the drawings on loan are rarely on view and they provide insight into the evolution of his iconic paintings, such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Guernica, while others stand alone as virtuoso, independent works, highlighting Picasso’s mastery of line, form, and medium. The book showcases drawings in a wide range of media, from works in charcoal and crayon to colored pencil, collage or papiers collés, graphite, gouache, ink, pastel, and watercolor. Picasso: Seven Decades of Drawing surveys Pablo Picasso’s prodigious career as a draftsman, including over 40 examples on loan from private collections spanning nearly 70 years of the artist’s long and celebrated career. “There’s nothing more difficult than a line.” –Pablo Picasso Picasso: Seven Decades of Drawing Author Olivier Berggruen and Christine Poggi, Contributions by Acquavella GalleriesĪ rare look at the exceptional works on paper from private collections by the master of modern art.

Picasso pencil drawings