Photograph · Wikimedia Commons
Picasso made roughly 50,000 works in his lifetime, paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, prints, costumes. With the French painter Georges Braque he invented Cubism, the breaking of the single fixed viewpoint so a face could show several sides at once, then walked away from it. He painted in classical styles in the 1920s, made the most famous antiwar painting of the century in 1937, and was wealthy by forty and a millionaire long before the end. He treated the women in his life badly, by their accounts and his own, and the work does not erase it. He outlived most of his contemporaries and rivals.
Lifeline
1881–1973 · 91 years
Nine periods across ninety-two years. The Demoiselles is right at the seam between the African mask period and analytic Cubism.
9 canonical periods
1901–1904
Blue Period
Sombre blues and greens. Painted in poverty.
1904–1906
Rose Period
Pinks, oranges, circus performers, harlequins.
1906–1909
African / Proto-Cubist
Ancient Iberian carving (the pre-Roman sculpture of his native Spain), then African masks brought to Paris through colonial channels, their makers unnamed. Demoiselles falls in this period.
1909–1912
Analytic Cubism
The object taken apart into faceted planes, with Braque, in Paris. Almost monochrome, almost unreadable.
1912–1919
Synthetic Cubism
The object built back up from flat shapes and pasted scraps, a brighter palette, sometimes literal newspaper.
1920–1929
Neoclassical
A return to classical figures, large women, Mediterranean light.
1930–1936
Surrealist tendency
Bull-headed Minotaurs, bodies melting into soft organic shapes, sex and violence.
1937–1945
War Years
Guernica, photographed as he painted it by Dora Maar, whose face became his Weeping Woman. Then the German occupation, which he sat out in Paris.
1946–1973
Late Period
Ceramics, painted variations on the old masters, the south of France. He never set foot in Spain again while Franco ruled.