Pablo Picasso's Famous Works: Milestones in Art History

The Spanish painter, graphic artist, and sculptor Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) influenced the art of the 20th century like no other. He created some of the most significant works in the history of art. Famous pictures by Picasso include "Guernica", "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", and "Child with Dove". His name has become synonymous with new beginnings and innovation in modern art.

Table of Contents

1. Pablo Picasso Developed His Art Further Through Various Phases
2. The "Blue Period" - A New Beginning for Picasso and Painting
3. The "Rose Period": The Return of Colour
4. Picasso's Inspiration from African Art
5. Analytical and Synthetic Cubism: Geometric Forms as the Building Blocks of Paintings
6. Picasso's Most Famous Works

Picasso was fundamentally connected to representational painting and worked with traditional pictorial themes and genres. However, he never aimed to imitate the subjects in his paintings as realistically as possible. Instead, he sought to capture the essence and character of his motifs in his works. To do so, he developed a completely new artistic form concept, abandoning the traditional conventions of pictorial composition and perspective.

This pioneering redefinition of artistic rules and his unique imagery culminated in the development of Cubism. Together with Georges Braque, he made geometric shapes the vocabulary of painting. The two painters thus not only revolutionised contemporary art but also significantly paved the way for abstraction.

However, many other art styles and techniques of the following decades were also influenced by Picasso's ideas, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Constructivism, as well as collages, ready-mades, and object art. Generations of artists up to the 21st century cite him as a central source of inspiration. This is not the only reason why, more than 50 years after Picasso's death, his name remains a permanent presence in the art world. His works are featured in all of the world's major art institutions and are regularly shown in exhibitions. Furthermore, Picasso's famous pictures often make headlines when auctioned for record prices.

Pablo Picasso Developed His Art Further Through Various Phases

Throughout his approximately 70-year career, Pablo Picasso continued to develop his style. Looking back at his oeuvre as a whole, his work can be divided into several major epochs. In each of his work phases, he focussed on specific formal features and creative means. The

• "Blue Period",
• "Rose Period",
• "African Period", as well as
• "Analytical", and
• "Synthetic Cubism",

are considered today to be the phases in which he made significant advances in pictorial design.

The "Blue Period" - A New Beginning for Picasso and Painting

Today, the "Blue Period" is defined as the phase when Picasso took his first steps towards an independent imagery. It is roughly defined as the period from 1901 to 1904.

In 1897, he left the art academy in Barcelona. Soon, he began to distance himself from academic painting styles, developing his own artistic individuality. His role models at the beginning of the 20th century included painters such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, and Auguste Rodin. Under this influence, Picasso's style was still recognisably figurative and showed many features of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

In terms of themes, Pablo Picasso dealt with subjects such as melancholy, grief, death, and fear. He often chose marginalised, lonely, or desperate people as the protagonists of his pictures. As Picasso revealed decades later, he processed his grief for his friend Carlos Casagemas, who had committed suicide in 1901, during this phase. Picasso's best-known works from this phase include

• "La Vie",
• "The Old Guitarist",
• "The Blue Room", and
• "La Soupe".

Picasso's Famous Works From the "Rose Period": The Return of Colour

Around 1905, the colours and atmosphere of Picasso's works gradually began to lighten again. Having just moved to Paris, he found new inspirations in the French art metropolis. A major thematic focus was the circus world for him during this time.

In numerous famous paintings, Picasso depicted clowns, jugglers, acrobats, and other performers. The basic mood of his pictures became significantly more cheerful, and the colour palette turned brighter again. Muted and cool colours were replaced by rose and other pastel tones. Picasso also continued to develop in terms of form and composition. He began to work with ever larger surfaces and sharper contours while gradually reducing the pictorial details.

Picasso's Inspiration from African Art

At the beginning of the 20th century, Europe was still under the influence of colonialism. In the course of this, many African art and cultural artefacts were brought to European countries and shown in exhibitions. This was also how Picasso encountered African art.

It is said that the painter Henri Matisse showed him artworks from the Congo for the first time in 1906. Picasso was very fascinated by the exotic forms and aesthetics. According to his own statement, he immediately felt the "magic" emanating from the exhibits. He repeatedly visited exhibitions at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris and also began to collect African masks and sculptures.

The new influences significantly impacted his own artistic work, so he adopted many elements of the aesthetics of African artworks. In particular, his depictions of heads and faces during this period show clear parallels with the design of tribal masks.

Analytical and Synthetic Cubism: Geometric Forms as the Building Blocks of Paintings

Many elements of Picasso's "African Phase" were incorporated into Cubism, which Picasso developed together with Georges Braque. Picasso and Braque met in Paris in 1907. They had already developed very similar design characteristics independently of each other by this time. Together, they continued to work on these over the course of many years.

Today, their collaboration is known as "Analytical Cubism". During this phase, Picasso and Braque deconstructed their subjects and reduced them to their basic forms. They depicted the subjects in fragments using geometric forms. They also moved away from the traditional forms of pictorial composition. Above all, they questioned the incidence of light and spatial depth. Instead, they developed new ways of depicting multiple perspectives of an object simultaneously.

They also gradually reduced their colour palette, working predominantly with muted colours such as brown, grey, beige, blue or black. From around 1912, "Synthetic Cubism" emerged as a variant of "Analytical Cubism", with Picasso playing a significant role.

The artists not only evolved the compositional process. They also began to work with new materials and techniques. They added various objects to their paintings and covered the canvas with paper, textiles, glass, metal, or wood. Synthetic Cubism thus paved the way for other 20th-century techniques such as collage, ready-made and object art.

Picasso's Most Famous Works

Pablo Picasso's oeuvre is said to encompass around 50,000 works. Today, many of them are considered among the most important works of art of all time. Identifying the most famous of these works is almost impossible, as he created numerous significant paintings crucial to art history.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)

"Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" is undoubtedly one of Picasso's most important works. It is considered a milestone in art history, marking the first time that Picasso consistently broke from the traditional and customary standards of painting. He was clearly working with the stylistic characteristics of Cubism. He reduced the pictorial objects to simplified forms and overrode conventional lighting and pictorial perspective. Influences from African art are also evident. The roughly 2.40 by 2.30 metre painting is said to have been prepared by Picasso with over 800 preliminary studies. Today it hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Guernica (1937)

"Guernica" is one of Picasso's most impressive and emotional works. In this approximately 3.50 by 7.80 metre painting, he depicted the destruction of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. In 1937, German and Italian warplanes attacked the town in the Basque Country. The monumental work was first exhibited in the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair. Today it is located in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and is considered a key work of Cubism as well as a powerful anti-war statement.

Child with Dove (1901)

"Child with Dove" is one of Picasso's most famous works from the early stages of his career. It marks the transition from his early style, still inspired by Impressionism, to his Blue Period. In terms of both proportions and composition, Picasso was still very much orientated towards traditional patterns. He was still considerably detached from the abstract, cubist imagery that would later make him famous. Nevertheless, this painting is one of his most popular works. The motif of a child carefully holding a dove has become a symbol of empathy and sensitivity.

Dove of Peace (1961)

There are many famous pictures by Picasso - but only this one achieved fame and popularity far beyond the art world. Picasso's "Dove of Peace" with an olive branch in its beak became a universal symbol of peace worldwide. The underlying lithograph from 1961 was created for a peace congress in Stockholm. However, this was not Picasso's first version of a dove of peace. As early as 1949, a white dove painted by him was advertised on a poster for the "World Congress of Fighters for Peace" in Paris. Picasso also created a new version of the white dove for many of the subsequent peace congresses.

Portrait of Dora Maar (1937)

Pablo Picasso's relationship with women can be described - carefully worded - as complex. He was married twice and had various muses and love affairs during his career. In art history, numerous articles are devoted exclusively to this aspect of his biography. Portraits of women also make up an important part of his oeuvre. He painted several portraits of the painter and photographer Dora Maar, who was his model, and lover for nine years. The 1937 painting "Portrait of Dora Maar" is among Picasso's best-known works.

Femme à la montre (1932)

"Femme à la montre" is another famous female portrait by Picasso, depicting French model Marie-Thérèse Walter at the end of the 1920s. She was also his model, lover, and later mother of his daughter Maya. Picasso portrayed Marie-Thérèse in several works. The 1932 version titled "Femme à la montre" was auctioned in 2023 for almost 140 million dollars.

Les femmes d'Alger (1955)

"Les femmes d'Alger" refers to an entire series of 15 oil paintings and over 100 drawings and prints that Picasso created between 1954 and 1955. He was inspired by Eugène Delacroixʼs work "The Women of Algiers". However, Picasso did not merely copy the original but rather transformed it significantly. In this series of paintings, he exhaustively explored the creative possibilities of painting. The best-known work from the series is the work known as "Version O". It was auctioned at Christie's in New York in 2015 for 179.4 million dollars, making it Picasso's most expensive publicly sold work.

Want to learn more about Picasso? Read our blog posts on the development of Cubism or about Pablo Picasso's women.