Picasso, Pablo Ruiz y

Picasso’s importance may be said to lie in the fact that, with Braque, he took one step further the abstraction to which Cézanne had arrived in his late work, and in so doing altered the course that art had followed since the Renaissance. He was also immensely prolific, producing some 20,000 works that encompassed a panoply of moods and styles, and a great variety of media, from painting, drawing, sculpture, and pottery to etching, lithography, and linocut.

One of the best collections of his work is displayed in the Musée Picasso in Paris, a gallery, which opened in 1985, devoted to works that were in the artist’s possession at the time of his death and that were accepted by the state in lieu of death duties.