Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) helped redefine what modern art could be: restless, experimental, and willing to break representation apart to rebuild it. His ethos was radical reinvention, treating style as a tool rather than a home, moving from the Blue and Rose periods into Cubism (with Georges Braque), collage, and a lifetime of shape-shifting painting, sculpture, printmaking, and ceramics. He didn’t just make new images; he changed the grammar of images, flattening space, multiplying viewpoints, and proving that a picture can be simultaneously intellectual, visceral, and political.

His impact is measured not only in influence but in institutional gravity: major bodies of his work anchor museums worldwide, with dedicated Musée Picasso collections in Paris and Barcelona, and major holdings across the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate (London), the Art Institute of Chicago, and many others. Guernica (1937) remains one of the most recognized anti-war statements in art history and is held by Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía—an emblem of how Picasso’s formal innovation could carry public moral weight.