Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso is perhaps the most influential artist of the twentieth century. He was Spanish but spent almost his entire adult life in France, and his constant changes of style mean that his paintings can look completely different from decade to decade. The seven works in ArtGuess.io trace that journey from Barcelona to the French Riviera.

Life and Places

Picasso was born in Málaga in 1881. His father was an art teacher, and the family moved to Barcelona in 1895, where the teenage Picasso painted academic family scenes such as An Evening at Home (1895). He visited Paris several times before settling there in 1904 in the Bateau-Lavoir studios in Montmartre.

In his Rose Period he painted circus performers and acrobats, as in Acrobat and Young Equilibrist (1905). In 1907 he completed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, whose fractured, mask-like figures shocked even his friends and opened the way to Cubism, which he developed with Georges Braque over the following years.

Picasso never stood still. In 1921 he spent the summer at Fontainebleau, where he painted both versions of Three Musicians, a late masterpiece of Synthetic Cubism, alongside works in a monumental neoclassical style. From 1961 he lived in Mougins, near Cannes, working with tremendous energy into his nineties. At Work (1971) comes from these final years. He died in Mougins in 1973.

How to Recognize Pablo Picasso

• Know the periods: Blue and Rose period figures, Cubist fragments, flat Synthetic Cubist shapes, or loose late paintings.
• France, not Spain: Apart from his youthful Barcelona works, almost everything was painted in France.
• Paris vs. the south: Pre-war works point to Paris; post-war works often point to the Mediterranean coast.

Where Pablo Picasso Painted

The 7 works by Pablo Picasso in the ArtGuess.io database were made in these places:

Paintings by Pablo Picasso in the Game