Pablo Picasso was certainly a very famous painter indeed, and he may be the first name you think of when someone mentions the word ‘artist’!

He was named after various saints and relatives.The “Picasso” is actually from his mother, Maria Picasso y Lopez. His father is named Jose Ruiz Blasco.

Picasso had such a difficult birth and was a very, very weak baby. In fact, he was so weak that the midwife thought that he was stillborn, meaning that he was born dead. She left him to go and look after Picasso’s mother. His uncle, who was a doctor named Don Salvador, was the one who saved him. Wow, lucky for him. Imagine us not ever knowing who Picasso was?

If you ask your parents what your first words were, they will probably say either ‘mama’ or ‘dada’, but Picasso’s first word, being the great artist that he was, was ‘piz’, which is short for ‘lapis’, the Spanish word for pencil. Picasso’s dad, Ruiz, decided to start teaching him art at the young age of 7. However, by the time Picasso was 13 years old, his dad decided to give up painting for good as he thought that Picasso was a far better painter than he was.

At the young age of 9, Picasso completed his first painting which was called ‘Le picador’, which was a man riding a horse in a bullfight. His first major painting, which was an ‘academic’ work was First Communion, which was a portrait of his father, mother, and younger sister kneeling before an altar. Picasso was 15 when he finished it.

Picasso was a “terrible student” and always seemed to end up in detention. Even though he was a brilliant artist, he did not like being told what to do and didn’t follow the rules, which meant detention for him all the time! He clearly didn’t enjoy school too much!

Picasso signed his first contract in Paris with art dealer by the name of Pere Menach. He agreed to pay Picasso 150 Francs per month, which is about the equivalent of US$750 today.

Did you know that there were rumors that Picasso stole the Mona Lisa? However, he didn’t. But, in 1911, when the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre, the police took in Picasso’s friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire ratted out Picasso as a suspect, so the police hauled him in for questioning, as well. Both were later released and found not-guilty of the crime.

In 1909, Picasso and French artist Georges Braque co-founded an art movement known as cubism. Actually, it was a French art critic Louis Vauxcelles who first called it ‘bizarre cubiques’ or cubism, after noticing that Picasso and Braque’s paintings were all “full of little cubes.”

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