49 Fun Facts About Pablo Picasso

In which Spanish city was Picasso born in 1881?

Málaga. He lived in the Andalusian port until 1891, when his father took a teaching job in A Coruña and moved the family to Spain's far north-west.

A family story says Picasso's first words were 'piz, piz', short for the Spanish word for what?

Pencil. 'Piz' was a toddler's attempt at lápiz, in a story the family liked to tell, and his father, a drawing teacher, became his first teacher.

Pablo Ruiz signed his paintings 'Picasso', a surname he got from whom?

His mother. Spanish custom gave him both parents' surnames, Ruiz and Picasso; he came to prefer hers, and by late 1901 he had dropped Ruiz from his signature.

Legend says Picasso's father, an art teacher, did what after seeing his teenage son's skill?

Gave up painting. In the usual telling he handed the boy his own brushes and palette, but it is only a legend; he went on teaching drawing in Barcelona for years.

Picasso's daughter Paloma made her name designing jewellery for which company?

Tiffany & Co. When her father died in 1973 she put her design career on hold to help catalogue the work he left, and only in 1980 did the jeweller bring out her first collection.

Which old master, known for elongated limbs and mystical faces, did the young Picasso admire in Madrid?

El Greco. Bored by classes at Madrid's Royal Academy of San Fernando, the 16-year-old studied the museums instead, and those stretched figures resurface in his Blue Period.

How did Picasso and the poet Max Jacob share a one-bed Paris room when both were broke?

Slept in shifts. Jacob took the bed at night and Picasso by day, after working until dawn, and they were so poor that some of his work was burned for warmth.

Steve Wynn had just agreed to sell Picasso's Le Rêve for $139 million when he did what?

Put his elbow through it. The casino owner, who has poor peripheral vision, tore the canvas while showing it to friends; repaired, it went to the same buyer in 2013 for $155 million.

Whose suicide helped set the sombre tone of Picasso's Blue Period?

His friend Carles Casagemas shot himself in a Paris café in 1901 after a failed love affair. Picasso painted him again and again, last as the young man in the allegory La Vie.

The gaunt musician in Picasso's The Old Guitarist shares which condition with many of his Blue Period figures?

Blindness. Picasso drew the period's blind beggars and castaways from the streets of Barcelona, and painted a sightless diner in The Blind Man's Meal of 1903.

Which figure became Picasso's personal symbol during the Rose Period?

The harlequin. In Family of Saltimbanques, the big 1905 canvas of travelling circus folk, Picasso gave the figure in the chequered costume his own face.

Which artists' model became Picasso's lover in Montmartre in 1904, as his blue paintings turned to rose?

Fernande Olivier. His happiness with her is one reason often given for the change, though he was so jealous that he hated her leaving the studio without him.

Which American writer collected Picasso's early work and hosted the Paris salon where he met Matisse?

Gertrude Stein. She claimed to have sat some ninety times for his portrait of her, and when people said it looked nothing like her, Picasso replied, 'She will.'

Which German-born Paris dealer championed Cubism from the start and sat for a 1910 Picasso portrait?

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. He put his painters under exclusive contract, agreeing to buy everything they made, and kept them out of the big public salons.

By his own account, where did Picasso see the African masks that fed into Les Demoiselles d'Avignon?

The Trocadéro ethnographic museum. He remembered the place as disgusting and wanted to leave, but he stayed, and later called the Demoiselles his first exorcism painting.

How did Matisse react when Picasso showed him Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in his studio?

He angrily called it a mockery. Matisse took the picture as an attempt to ridicule modern painting and vowed to get even, and it stayed out of public view until 1916.

With which painter did Picasso develop Analytic Cubism?

Georges Braque. They met almost daily, a partnership later likened to two mountaineers roped together, and their brown-and-grey canvases of that time are hard to tell apart.

In 1911 Picasso was brought before a Paris magistrate and questioned over the theft of which painting?

The Mona Lisa. Shaking with fear, he told the magistrate he barely knew his friend Apollinaire, the poet jailed over the theft, and both men were later cleared.

Picasso's 1912 Still Life with Chair Caning, with its printed oilcloth, is often called the first Cubist what?

Collage. The 'caning' is a factory-printed fake, a scrap of oilcloth patterned like a chair seat, while the rope that frames the oval canvas is real.

Picasso lettered 'Ma Jolie' into Cubist canvases as a tribute to which lover?

Eva Gouel. He wrote 'J'aime Eva' on other canvases too, and he was devastated when she died young during the First World War.

Picasso's first wife, Olga Khokhlova, was a ballerina with which company?

Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. He met her in Rome in 1917 while designing the company's ballet Parade, and they married the next year with full Russian Orthodox ceremony in Paris.

Picasso's son Paulo spent much of his adult life working for his father as what?

Chauffeur. Paulo drove his father about for a meagre wage paid by the week, a bleak sequel for the little boy Picasso had once sketched tenderly, again and again.

Picasso and which composer collaborated on the ballet Pulcinella in 1920?

Igor Stravinsky. He balked at first at reworking 18th-century tunes then credited to Pergolesi, but the old manuscripts won him over, and the score opened his neoclassical period.

Which 17-year-old did Picasso stop outside a Paris store in 1927?

Marie-Thérèse Walter. He introduced himself with 'I am Picasso', a name that meant nothing to her, and he later set her up in a flat across the street from the home he shared with his wife.

Which mythical creature did Picasso adopt as an alter ego in the 1930s, above all in his Vollard Suite etchings?

The minotaur. Picasso used the half-man, half-bull as a kind of self-portrait, a figure torn between the human and the bestial, and it prowls his Vollard Suite etchings.

Guernica depicts the bombing of a Basque town during which war?

The Spanish Civil War. The Republic had already hired him to paint a mural for its pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair, and the raid by German bombers flying for Franco handed him his subject.

Which Surrealist photographer recorded Guernica stage by stage as Picasso painted it?

Dora Maar. His lover at the time, she also found him the vast studio where he painted it, and her stark black-and-white prints are thought to have nudged him to drop colour.

At Picasso's wish, where did Guernica hang until democracy returned to Spain?

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Picasso left it there in trust for a future Spanish republic, and it went home in 1981, after Franco's death, to a country that had a king instead.

In a much-told story, what did Picasso tell a German officer who asked whether he had done Guernica?

'No, you did', he is said to have snapped, in a story set in his Paris studio during the Occupation, when casting bronze was banned and he had his sculptures cast all the same.

In 1935 Picasso set his brushes aside for almost a year and threw himself into writing what?

Poems. Verse led on to plays, and his Desire Caught by the Tail got a 1944 reading in occupied Paris with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the cast and Camus directing.

Which painter, 40 years Picasso's junior, left him in 1953 and wrote the memoir Life with Picasso?

Françoise Gilot. She met him in occupied Paris at 21, had Claude and Paloma with him and walked out after a decade; once her book appeared he refused to see the children again.

Where was Jacqueline Roque, later Picasso's second wife, working when he met her in the early 1950s?

The Madoura Pottery in Vallauris. She sold its wares while he made ceramics in the workshop, and they married in secret at the town hall there in 1961, when he was 79.

Picasso's 1950s series of reinterpretations of Las Meninas reworked a painting by whom?

Velázquez. In 1957 Picasso painted dozens of variations on the court scene, swapping the big royal hound in the foreground for his own house guest, a dachshund called Lump.

Which American city, one he never visited, got a 50-foot steel sculpture from Picasso as a gift in 1967?

Chicago. He waved away his fee and called the design a gift to the people of a city he never saw, while locals at the unveiling argued over whether it was a bird, a woman or an Afghan hound.

Le Mystère Picasso, the 1956 film of Picasso painting on camera, won a special jury prize at which festival?

Cannes. Henri-Georges Clouzot filmed from the far side of the paper while Picasso's inks bled through, so each picture seems to draw itself with the painter out of sight.

Picasso's reported last words, 'Drink to me', became a 1973 song by which former Beatle?

Paul McCartney. Over dinner in Jamaica, Dustin Hoffman quoted him the painter's farewell toast, and McCartney picked up a guitar and set the words to a tune on the spot; the song is on Band on the Run.

Picasso lies buried at Vauvenargues, below Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain painted again and again by whom?

Cézanne. Picasso looked on him as an artistic father, and in 1958 he bought the old château on the mountain's flank, proud to live in its shadow; his grave is in the grounds.

What did France accept from Picasso's heirs in place of inheritance tax?

Art from his estate. The state took its pick of the vast hoard he had kept for himself, and that selection became the core of the Musée Picasso in Paris.

Roughly how many of his own works did Picasso own at his death?

50,000 or so. From the 1920s his work fetched such prices that he could sell a little and keep the bulk of what he made for himself.

A 2012 nanoprobe study of The Red Armchair confirmed Picasso often used what unexpected medium?

Common house paint. X-rays matched the pigment to the Ripolin brand, which dries fast and glossy and hides brush marks; the scientists bought decades-old tins on eBay to compare.

Why did Picasso date his works, often to the exact day?

To leave posterity a complete record. He told the photographer Brassaï that it was not enough to know an artist's pictures; one also had to know when, why and how he made them.

Picasso's 1940 application for French citizenship was refused on what grounds?

His ideas leaned towards communism. A police report branded him a radical drifting that way, the refusal stayed secret until 2003, and four years after it he did join the French Communist Party.

In 1936 Spain's embattled Republic gave Picasso, who stayed in Paris, which official post?

Director of the Prado. He held the post from Paris, and as bombs fell on Madrid the museum's masterpieces were rushed out to the safety of Valencia.

Why did the Communist Party criticise Picasso's 1953 portrait of Stalin?

It was insufficiently realistic. Picasso drew the dead leader as a stylised young man, party members howled, and the poet Louis Aragon, who had asked for the sketch and printed it, had to recant in public.

Which Swiss city's voters agreed in a 1967 referendum to buy two Picassos for their museum?

Basel. Voters approved six million francs to keep the pair, put up for sale when a plane crash bankrupted their owner's airline, and a delighted Picasso, then 86, gave the museum several more pictures.

Picasso's Women of Algiers, which set an auction record for a painting in 2015, reworks an 1834 canvas by whom?

Eugène Delacroix. Picasso began the fifteen versions weeks after his rival Matisse died, joking that Matisse had left him his odalisques as a legacy; Version O fetched $179 million in 2015.

The Art Loss Register's 2012 league table put Picasso far ahead of every other artist for what?

Pieces stolen. The register had 1,147 missing Picassos on its books, more than twice the total for the runner-up, the little-known American painter Nick Lawrence.

Who plays Picasso in the 1996 film Surviving Picasso?

Anthony Hopkins. The painter's son Claude, who controlled the rights, objected to the script and refused to let the film show a single real Picasso, so every canvas on screen is a look-alike made for the shoot.

Which Paris museum hung a selection of Picassos in its Grande Galerie in 1971 to mark his 90th birthday?

The Louvre. No living artist had been hung in its Grande Galerie before, a state honour from the country that had quietly turned down his bid for citizenship three decades earlier.