50 Fun Facts About Pablo Picasso

In which Spanish city was Picasso born in 1881?

His father José Ruiz y Blasco was a painter who specialised in naturalistic pictures of birds and game.

According to his mother, Picasso's first words were 'piz, piz', short for the Spanish word for what?

He was drawing seriously from a very young age and took formal lessons from his father from seven.

The surname Picasso, his mother's, originally came from which region of Italy?

His maternal great-grandfather Tommaso Picasso moved to Spain around 1807.

An apocryphal story says Picasso's father gave up painting after seeing his 13-year-old son finish a sketch of what?

The father specialised in birds; the story is told of their years in A Coruña.

How long did 13-year-old Picasso take on the Barcelona academy entrance exam that usually took a month?

The family had moved to Barcelona after his seven-year-old sister Conchita died of diphtheria.

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

He had been sent to the Real Academia de San Fernando at 16 but soon stopped attending classes.

In 1900 Picasso shared a tiny Paris room with poet Max Jacob. What was the arrangement?

They were so poor that much of Picasso's work was burned to keep the room warm.

Which magazine did Picasso found in Madrid in 1901 with his anarchist friend Francisco de Asís Soler?

It ran for five issues; by the first, on 31 March 1901, he had started signing his work simply 'Picasso'.

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

He painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas, culminating in the allegory La Vie (1903), now in Cleveland.

Which theme recurs in Blue Period works such as The Blindman's Meal and Celestina?

The etching The Frugal Repast pairs a blind man and a sighted woman at a nearly bare table.

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

Circus performers, known in France as saltimbanques, fill the paintings of 1904 to 1906.

Who was Picasso's bohemian mistress from 1904, seen in many Rose Period paintings?

He left her once he had some fame and money for Marcelle Humbert, known as Eva.

Which American writer became Picasso's principal patron and hosted the 1905 salon where he met Matisse?

Her brother Leo, and the Cone sisters of Baltimore, also collected him; Matisse became a lifelong friend and rival.

Which German-born dealer, whose Paris gallery Picasso joined in 1907, championed Cubism from the start?

He also promoted Braque, Derain, Léger and Gris; his contract lapsed when he was exiled from France in the war.

Where had Picasso seen African artefacts before repainting two faces in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon?

When friends saw the painting they were shocked; Matisse dismissed it as a hoax, and it was not shown publicly until 1916.

How did Matisse react when shown Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907?

The three left-hand figures were inspired by Iberian sculpture.

With which painter did Picasso develop Analytic Cubism?

Both took objects apart in monochrome browns and greys; their paintings of the time are hard to tell apart.

In 1911 Picasso was arrested and questioned over the theft of which painting?

Apollinaire had implicated him; fearing deportation, Picasso denied ever having met the poet. Both were cleared.

Still Life with Chair Caning (1912), often called the first Cubist collage, incorporates what material?

It is oil and printed oilcloth on canvas edged with rope, and is also considered the first assemblage.

Picasso's mistress Eva Gouel, celebrated in many Cubist works, died in 1915 at what age?

He was devastated; he then had an affair with Gaby Lespinasse.

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

He was designing Erik Satie's ballet Parade in Rome; they married in 1918 and honeymooned near Biarritz.

Picasso's son Paulo grew up to be a motorcycle racer and what else?

He was the only legitimate child; Olga refused a divorce and they stayed married until her death in 1955.

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

He made several drawings of the composer during the project.

How old was Marie-Thérèse Walter when Picasso met her in 1927?

She became his 'golden muse' and the mother of his daughter Maya; he hid them in a flat across the street from his wife.

Which creature replaced Picasso's earlier circus symbol as a common motif in his work of the 1930s?

It came partly from the surrealists, who used it as a symbol, and appears in Guernica and the Vollard Suite.

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

German and Italian aircraft carried out the raid; the painting was shown at the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris Exposition.

Which photographer and lover of Picasso documented the painting of Guernica?

Her black-and-white photographs are thought to have influenced the picture's monochrome scheme.

Where was Guernica kept until 1981, at Picasso's wish that it not go to Spain until democracy returned?

It hung at the Prado's Casón del Buen Retiro after its return and moved to the Reina Sofía in 1992.

When a Gestapo officer saw a photo of Guernica and asked 'Did you do that?', what did Picasso reply?

He stayed in occupied Paris throughout the war, unable to exhibit, casting bronze with metal smuggled by the Resistance.

Between 1935 and 1959 Picasso wrote more than 300 of what?

Mostly untitled except for a date, they were erotic and sometimes scatological; he also wrote plays such as Desire Caught by the Tail.

How much younger than Picasso was Françoise Gilot when they met in 1944?

They had two children, Claude and Paloma; her 1964 memoir Life with Picasso so angered him that he cut off the children.

Picasso's second wife, Jacqueline Roque, worked where when they met in 1952?

He made and painted ceramics there; they married in 1961 and stayed together until his death.

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

He also based paintings on Goya, Poussin, Manet, Courbet and Delacroix.

Picasso said the 50-foot Chicago Picasso sculpture represented the head of what?

Unveiled in 1967, it remains a downtown landmark; he refused the $100,000 fee and gave it to the city.

Which director made the 1955 documentary Le Mystère Picasso with the artist?

Picasso also appeared as himself in Cocteau's Testament of Orpheus in 1960.

Where did Picasso die in April 1973?

He had painted until 3 a.m. the night before; the cause was a heart attack brought on by pulmonary edema.

Picasso is buried at the château he bought in 1958 in which place?

Only Paulo, the sole legitimate child, was allowed at the funeral; Jacqueline barred the others.

Picasso died without a will. What was his estate valued at in the December 1976 settlement?

French judges gave his three illegitimate children a share despite opposition from Jacqueline and Paulo.

Roughly how many unsold works were in Picasso's estate at his death?

1,885 paintings, 1,228 sculptures, 3,222 ceramics and 7,089 drawings among them; only Bob Ross rivals his volume.

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

He also sometimes mixed sand into his paint for texture, and did much of his painting at night by artificial light.

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

Critic Arthur Danto called his output a 'vast pictorial autobiography'.

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

The refusal was not made public until 2003; he joined the French Communist Party in 1944.

At the start of the war in Spain in 1936, the Republicans gave Picasso which post in absentia?

He took it seriously, funding the evacuation of the collection to Geneva.

Picasso's black-and-white lithograph Dove (1949) became the emblem of what?

He received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1950 and the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962.

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

He stayed a loyal member until his death; dealer Kahnweiler called his communism 'sentimental'.

Which city's citizens voted in a 1968 referendum to buy two Picassos for their museum?

Touched, Picasso donated three more paintings and a sketch and was made an honorary citizen.

Picasso's Women of Algiers set what record when it sold for $179.3 million in May 2015?

The Cubist record went to Femme Assise (1909) at £43.2 million a year later.

By one measure Picasso leads all artists in what unfortunate category?

In 2012 the Art Loss Register listed 1,147 of his works as stolen.

Who plays Picasso in the 1996 film Surviving Picasso?

He also appears as a character in Steve Martin's play Picasso at the Lapin Agile.

Picasso became the first living artist given a special exhibition in the Louvre's Grand Gallery to mark which birthday?

Robert Hughes wrote that not even Michelangelo had been so famous in his own lifetime.