Pablo Picasso could draw before he could speak well, and his father - also an artist - gave him brushes when he was just a little kid. By age 13 he was already so skilled that his father supposedly handed over his own paints and never picked them up again.
As an adult living in Paris, Picasso kept changing the way he painted. He had a Blue Period of sad, gloomy paintings, then a Rose Period of warmer ones. Then, with his friend Georges Braque, he invented Cubism: chopping up faces and objects into geometric shapes and showing them from many angles at once.
Picasso painted, sculpted, made ceramics, designed costumes, and worked in just about every art form. By the time he died at 91, he had produced something like 50,000 pieces. His huge 1937 painting Guernica - a black, white, and gray scream against war - is one of the most famous artworks of the 20th century.
