Pablo Picasso

Most people meet him through Guernica, or through a face that has two profiles at once. That second thing — the fracturing of a single viewpoint into planes, then reassembling those planes as a piece of thinking rather than a picture — was the work he did with Braque, and it became Cubism. Before that came the earlier periods, the Blue and the Rose, which held melancholy and tenderness rather than analysis. African art and Iberian sculpture opened doors he then walked through.

He was born in Málaga in 1881 and worked until his death in 1973, and the sheer volume is part of the point. Painting, sculpture, drawing, ceramics, prints — the studio functioned as a laboratory, and each decade brought a reinvention that did not cancel what came before. He worked with poets and choreographers, crossing out of visual art entirely. Portraits and still lifes served as sites for play and, at times, protest. Fame cost him privacy and extended his reach at the same time.

Guernica remains the piece that carries the most public weight: a newspaper atrocity turned into large-scale grief with a graphic directness that made it a matter of conscience rather than commentary. He kept taking risks into old age.

For anyone looking at him now, the useful thing is the range, not the style. Museums lay his phases out as chapters in an education that never settled. Critics argue about the ethics as much as the innovation, and his name carries both genius and controversy. What the body of work actually offers is permission to attempt something — daring treated as a working method rather than a temperament.