Pablo Picasso was the most dominant and influential artist of the 1st half of the 20th century. Associated most of all with pioneering Cubism, he also invented collage and made a major contribution to Surrealism. Picasso saw himself above all as a painter, yet his sculpture was greatly influential, and he also explored areas as diverse as printmaking and ceramics.

Finally, Picasso was a famously charismatic personality, the leading figure in the Ecole de Paris. 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.

Influenced by the novelties of Cézanne, and also by African sculpture and ancient Iberian art, Pablo Picasso started to lend his figures more structure and to deconstruct the conventions of perspective that had dominated painting since the Renaissance. This led him (alongside Georges Braque) to evolve an entirely new Cubist movement, which rapidly became the cutting edge of modern art.

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.

Pablo Picasso’s influence was profound and far-reaching for most of his life. His work in pioneering Cubism established a set of pictorial problems, devices, and approaches, which remained important well into the 1950s. 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. Source: WikiArt.