Character Catalog

Monumental canvas (244 × 234 cm) held at MoMA in New York, considered the founding act of Cubism. Through the radical distortion of bodies and the influence of African masks, it definitively breaks with Western pictorial tradition.

Immense painting in black, white, and grey (349 × 776 cm), commissioned by the Spanish Republican government for the Paris International Exposition. A masterpiece of political realism, it denounces the bombing of the Basque city of Guernica and has become a universal symbol against war.

Portrait of the American collector and writer Gertrude Stein, produced after 80 sitting sessions. This painting marks the transition between the Rose Period and Picasso's first proto-Cubist experiments.

An emblematic work of Analytic Cubism, in which forms are broken down into interlocking geometric facets to the point of making the subject almost unrecognisable. The title borrows a refrain from a popular song, grounding the work in everyday life.

Lithograph depicting a white dove with outstretched wings, created at the request of the World Peace Movement. This drawing instantly became an international symbol of pacifism and resistance to the Cold War.

Large symbolist canvas from the Blue Period depicting two couples facing each other, rendered in cold, melancholic tones. It is often interpreted as a meditation on love, suffering, and the human condition, following the death of Picasso's friend Carlos Casagemas.

A series of 58 paintings completed in a few months, constituting a Cubist reinterpretation of Velázquez's famous painting. This series bears witness to the constant dialogue Picasso maintained with the Old Masters throughout his career.

I seek to paint what I think, not what I see. Painting is a way of seizing life.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them. Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

I am a communist and my painting is communist. I have sought, through painting and drawing, since those are my weapons, to penetrate ever deeper into a knowledge of the world and of mankind.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards you can remove all traces of reality.

In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.

Picasso's birthplace, where he was born on October 25, 1881. The Picasso Museum in Málaga today houses many of his early works and traces his Andalusian origins.

A collective studio located at 13 place Émile-Goudeau in Paris, where Picasso lived and worked from 1904 to 1909. It was there that he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and met Braque, Apollinaire, and Gertrude Stein.

A Basque town bombed on April 26, 1937 by the Nazi Condor Legion and Italian fascist air forces, killing hundreds of civilians. This tragedy inspired Picasso to create his most famous political masterpiece.

A ceramics town where Picasso settled in 1946 and revolutionized local craftsmanship. He produced over 4,000 ceramic works there and painted War and Peace on the walls of the castle's Romanesque chapel.

Located in the Hôtel Salé in the Marais district, this museum holds the largest public collection of Picasso's works in the world, assembled from the donation of his estate to the French state in 1979.

A Provençal village where Picasso spent his final years at his villa Notre-Dame-de-Vie. He died there on April 8, 1973, having continued to paint until the day before his death.

Picasso worked with a wide variety of brushes and palettes cluttered with colors. His studio was renowned for its creative disorder, where tools lay scattered among canvases and collected objects.

A committed communist, Picasso regularly read L'Humanité, the newspaper of the French Communist Party. He published drawings in it and expressed his political commitments against war and fascism.

The discovery of African and Oceanic masks at the Trocadéro museum in 1907 was a revelation for Picasso and directly influenced the creation of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. These objects opened the way for him towards an expressionist distortion of faces.

From 1946 onwards, Picasso became passionate about ceramics in Vallauris. He used the potter's wheel to create thousands of original pieces, exploring a new medium with the same inventiveness he brought to painting.

The guitar is a recurring object in Picasso's work, a symbol of his Spanish origins and a favourite theme of his Cubist period. He also created a guitar in sheet metal and wire in 1912, a revolutionary three-dimensional sculpture.

Picasso never travelled without a sketchbook. Dozens of sketchbooks have been preserved, bearing witness to his perpetually moving visual thinking and the genesis of his major works.