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Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, draughtsman, graphic and stage designer, and ceramicist, born in Mádaga, Andalusia. The indisputable genius of 20th-c. art, Pablo Picasso, like Michelangelo whom he in some ways emulated, stands as one of a handful of the most important artists in the whole history of Western art. Encouraged by his father José Ruiz Blasco, an artist and teacher of art, Pablo Picasso studied principally in Barcelona where he mostly lived (1896-1904). Until 1898 Pablo Picasso signed his pictures with his father's name, Ruiz, as well as his mother's, Picasso. In 1898-9 he began occasionally using only his mother's name and from 1900-1 he dropped his father's name. He 1st visited Paris in 1900, then in 1901 and 1902, and 1904. Pablo Picasso showed prodigious artistic ability from his youth, e.g. Man in a Cap (1895) and Portrait of the Artist's Sister (1899). In 1900, the year of his 1st visit to Paris, Pablo Picasso was deeply impressed by Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Van Gogh, while retaining what he had learnt in his native country from El Greco, Velazquez and Goya. Le Moulin de la Galette (1900), probably his 1st painting in Paris, shows the influence of Toulouse-Lautrec, while Paris Street (1900) and On the Upper Deck (1901) demonstrate how impressed he was by Parisian life seen in its cabarets, boulevards, public gardens and racecourses. In Self-Portrait (1901) and also in his paintings until early 1904, his so-called Blue Period, an element of melancholy dominates his work with subjects of vagabonds, beggars, prostitutes, poverty-stricken and deprived people, e.g. the Old Guitarist (1903), who frequented the bars of Montmartre or the streets of Barcelona where he spent the greater part of these years until he settled in Paris in 1904. The restricted ethereal blue colour and simplified, plastic forms combined to create an intense melancholy and pathos away from the atmospheric effects of Impressionism.
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