Pablo Picasso (b. 1881, Málaga, Spain; d. 1973, Mougins, France) was perhaps the most influential artist of the 20th century. Though Spanish, Picasso worked mainly in France, and his first mature phase in Paris was his Blue Period, followed by the Rose period. With Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, the pioneered the style cubism without which modern and contemporary art would be radically different. Another of his most enduring images, the iconic Guernica, immortalizes the brutality of the Spanish Civil War. With analytic cubism, synthetic cubism, surrealism, and the incorporation of 'primitive' imagery, Picasso and his contemporaries Braque and Duchamp challenged the trajectory of the arts and rebuilt the context in which future generations of artists practiced.
