Spanish expatriate Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, as well as the co-creator of Cubism. A serious and prematurely world-weary child, the young Picasso possessed a pair of piercing, watchful black eyes that seemed to mark him destined for greatness. If you become a monk you'll end up as the pope,'" he later recalled. Though he was a relatively poor student, Picasso displayed a prodigious talent for drawing at a very young age. Picasso's father began teaching him to draw and paint when he was a child, and by the time he was 13 years old, his skill level had surpassed his father's.
Soon, Picasso lost all desire to do any schoolwork, choosing to spend the school days doodling in his notebook instead. I could have stayed there forever, drawing without stopping. In , when Picasso was 14 years old, he moved with his family to Barcelona, Spain. Although the school typically only accepted students several years his senior, Picasso's entrance exam was so extraordinary that he was granted an exception and admitted.
Nevertheless, Picasso chafed at the School of Fine Arts' strict rules and formalities, and began skipping class so that he could roam the streets of Barcelona, sketching the city scenes he observed. However, he again became frustrated with his school's singular focus on classical subjects and techniques. Inspired by the anarchists and radicals he met there, Picasso made his decisive break from the classical methods in which he had been trained, and began what would become a lifelong process of experimentation and innovation.
At the turn of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso moved to Paris, France—the cultural center of European art—to open his own studio. Art critics and historians typically break Picasso's adult career into distinct periods, the first of which lasted from to and is called his "Blue Period," after the color that dominated nearly all of Picasso's paintings over these years.
Lonely and deeply depressed over the death of his close friend, Carlos Casagemas, he painted scenes of poverty, isolation and anguish, almost exclusively in shades of blue and green. In contemplation of Picasso and his Blue Period, Symbolist writer and critic Charles Morice once asked, "Is this frighteningly precocious child not fated to bestow the consecration of a masterpiece on the negative sense of living, the illness from which he more than anyone else seems to be suffering? By , Picasso had largely overcome the depression that had previously debilitated him.
