Freemason

Early years
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Malaga, Spain. He was the eldest and only son with two younger sisters, Lola and Concepción. His father, José Ruiz Blasco, was a professor in the School of Arts and Crafts. Pablo's mother was Maria Ruiz Picasso (the artist used her surname from about 1901 on). It is rumored that Picasso learned to draw before he could speak. As a child, his father frequently took him to bullfights, and one of his earlier paintings was a scene from a bullfight.
In 1891 the family moved to La Coruña, where, at the age of fourteen, Picasso began studying at the School of Fine Art. Under the academic instruction of his father, he developed his artistic talent at an extraordinary rate.
When the family moved to Barcelona, Spain, in 1896, Picasso easily gained entrance to the School of Fine Arts. A year later he was admitted as an advanced student at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Spain. He demonstrated his remarkable ability by completing in one day an entrance examination for which an entire month was permitted.
Picasso soon found the atmosphere at the academy stifling, and he returned to Barcelona, where he began to study historical and contemporary art on his own. At that time Barcelona was the most vital cultural center in Spain, and Picasso quickly joined the group of poets, painters, and writers who gathered at the famous café Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats). Between 1900 and 1903 Picasso stayed alternately in Paris, France, and Barcelona. He had his first one-man exhibition in Paris in 1901.

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Paris at the turn of the twentieth century
At the turn of the twentieth century Paris was the center of the international art world. In painting it was the birthplace of the impressionists—painters who depicted the appearance of objects by means of dabs or strokes of unmixed colors in order to create the look of actual reflected light. While their works retained certain links with the visible world, they exhibited a decided tendency toward flatness and abstraction.
Picasso set up a permanent studio in Paris in 1904. His studio soon became a gathering place for the city's most modern artists, writers, and patrons.
Picasso's early work reveals a creative pattern which continued throughout his long career. Between 1900 and 1906 he worked through nearly every major style of contemporary (modern) painting. In doing so, his own work changed with extraordinary quickness.

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Blue and pink periods
The years between 1901 and 1904 were known as Picasso's Blue Period. Nearly all of his works were executed in somber shades of blue and contained lean, melancholy, and introspective (concentrating on their own thoughts) figures. Two outstanding examples of this period are the Old Guitarist (1903) and Life (1903).
In the second half of 1904 Picasso's style took a new direction. In these paintings the color became more natural, delicate, and tender in its range, with reddish and pink tones dominating the works. Thus this period was called his Pink Period. The most celebrated example of this phase is the Family of Saltimbanques(1905). Picasso's work between 1900 and 1905 was generally flat, emphasizing the two-dimensional character of the painting surface. Late in 1905, however, he became increasingly interested in pictorial volume. This interest seems to have been influenced by the late paintings of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906).
The face in Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906) reveals still another new interest: its mask-like abstraction was inspired by Iberian sculpture, an exhibition of which Picasso had seen at the Louvre, in Paris, in the spring of 1906. This influence reached its fullest expression a year later in one of the most revolutionary pictures of Picasso's entire career, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907).

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Picasso and cubism
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is generally regarded as the first cubist painting. The faces of the figures are seen from both front and profile positions at the same time. Between 1907 and 1911 Picasso continued to break apart the visible world into increasingly small facets of monochromatic (using one color) planes of space. In doing so, his works became more and more abstract. Representation gradually vanished from his painting, until it became an end in itself—for the first time in the history of Western art.

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Collages and further development
About 1911 Picasso and Georges Braque (1882–1963) began to introduce letters and scraps of newspapers into their cubist paintings, thus creating an entirely new medium, the cubist collage. Picasso's first, and probably his most celebrated, collage is Still Life with Chair Caning (1911–1912).
After Picasso experimented with the new medium of collage, he returned more intensively to painting. In his Three Musicians (1921), the planes became broader, more simplified, and more colorful. In its richness of feeling and balance of formal elements, the Three Musicians represents a classical expression of cubism.
Additional achievements
Picasso also created sculpture and prints throughout his long career, and made numerous important contributions to both media. He periodically worked in ceramics, and designed sets, curtains, and interiors for the theater.
In painting, even the development of cubism fails to define Picasso's genius. About 1915, and again in the early 1920s, he turned away from abstraction and produced drawings and paintings in a realistic and serenely beautiful classical style. One of the most famous of these works is the Woman in White (1923). Painted just two years after the Three Musicians, the quiet and unobtrusive (not calling attention to itself) elegance of this masterpiece testifies to the ease with which Picasso could express himself pictorially.
Guernica
One of Picasso's most celebrated paintings of the 1930s is Guernica (1937). This work had been commissioned for the Spanish Government Building at the Paris World's Fair. It depicts the destruction by bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39; the military revolt against the Spanish government). The artist's deep feelings about the work, and about the massacre (a mass killing) which inspired it, are reflected in the fact that he completed the work, that is more than 25 feet wide and 11 feet high, within six or seven weeks.
Guernica is an extraordinary monument within the history of modern art. Executed entirely in black, white, and gray, it projects an image of pain, suffering, and brutality that has few parallels. Picasso applied the pictorial language of cubism to a subject that springs directly from social and political awareness.

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Picasso's politics
Picasso also declared publicly in 1947 that he was a Communist (someone who believes the national government should control all businesses and the distribution of goods). When he was asked why he was a Communist, he stated, "When I was a boy in Spain, I was very poor and aware of how poor people had to live. I learned that the Communists were for the poor people. That was enough to know. So I became for the Communists." But sometimes the Communist cause was not as keen on Picasso as Picasso was about being a Communist. A 1953 portrait he painted of Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) caused an uproar in the Communist Party's leadership. The Soviet government banished his works.
Although Picasso had been in exile from his native Spain since the 1939 victory of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1892–1975), he gave eight hundred to nine hundred of his earliest works to the city and people of Barcelona. To display these works, the Palacio Aguilar was renamed the Picasso Museum and the works were moved inside. But because of Franco's dislike for Picasso, Picasso's name never appeared on the museum.
Picasso was married twice, first to dancer Olga Khoklova and then to Jacqueline Roque. He had four children. He was planning an exhibit of over two hundred of his works at the Avignon Arts Festival in France when he died at his thirty-five-room hilltop villa of Notre Dame de Vie in Mougins, France, on April 8, 1973.
The discovery of cubism represents Picasso's most important achievement in the history of twentieth-century art. Throughout his life he exhibited a remarkable genius for sculpture, graphics, and ceramics, as well as painting. His is one of the most celebrated artists of the modern period.

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LEGACY
Picasso's influence was profound and far-reaching for most of his life. His work in pioneering Cubism established a set of pictorial problems, devices, and approaches, which remained important well into the 1950s. And at each stage of his career, from the classical works of the 1920s to the works produced in occupied Paris during the 1940s, his example was important. Even after the war, even though the energy in avant-garde art shifted to New York, Picasso remained a titanic figure, and one who could never be ignored. Indeed, even though the Abstract Expressionists could be said to have superseded aspects of Cubism (even while being strongly influenced by him), The Museum of Modern Art in New York has been called "the house that Pablo built," because it has so widely exhibited the artist's work. MoMA's opening exhibition in 1930 included fifteen paintings by Picasso. He was also a part of Alfred Barr's highly influential survey shows Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) andFantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936-37). Although his influence undoubtedly waned in the 1960s, he had by that time become a Pop icon, and the public's fascination with his life story continue to fuel interest in his work.

Pablo and the Boss: The Amazing Story of Chicago's Picasso
SPECTATOR #1: Of course, everybody thinks it's a bird.
SPECTATOR #2: It looks like a horse. Or maybe a horse's end or something.
SPECTATOR #3: It looks kind of like a monster.
SPECTATOR #4: I think it looks like a bride.
SPECTATOR #5: It is an abstract expression. That's all it is. We should respect it as that.

Ask five different passersby at random what the sculpture outside of the Daley Center at 50 W. Washington Street represents and you're likely to get five different answers.

This 50-foot-tall, 162-ton landmark has become an indelible icon and unofficial logo for the city of Chicago. But what is it? And how did it get here?

It took an unlikely alliance between the conservative Mayor Richard J. Daley and the flamboyant Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. The man who managed to be a liaison between them was architect William Hartmann of the firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

Prior to the arrival of the Picasso statue, most public art in metropolitan areas was fairly staid, mostly statues of historical figures. Professor Franz Schulze of Lake Forest College remembers: "They were important as objects of history, not necessarily of art." But in the 1960s, the architecture of American cities started to reflect the sweeping cultural changes taking place in society.

In 1960, the Public Building Commission of Chicago approved a plan for a grand 31-story civic center. Even before ground had been broken, it was decided that a monumental sculpture would grace the plaza. But who to choose as sculptor for so significant a project? Various names were tossed about; then, as architect Carter Manny remembers, "It was suggested that we put names in a hat, and, remarkably enough, everyone had chosen Pablo Picasso." Gaining a Picasso would be an incredible coup for the city, but it wouldn't be an easy matter. Approval of the Spanish libertine must come from Mayor Daley, politically conservative by upbringing and nature. Architect Hartmann proposed Picasso's name to the Mayor, whose response was as surprising as it was swift. Manny recalls Daley said that "if you gentlemen think he's the greatest, that's what we want for Chicago, and you go ahead."

Picasso was 82 years old at the time. He was living on the French Riviera and "not one to make appointments." But the tireless efforts by Hartmann and his colleagues to seek out the artist and gain his participation culminated in Picasso's agreement to take on the project.

Once the Mayor approved the work, ("It looks like the wings of justice," Daley is reported to have told aides), he sent Hartmann back to Picasso with a check for $100,000 as payment. The artist, who had never specified a fee, examined it, and then put it back in Hartmann's pocket, saying, "This is my gift to the people of Chicago."

The statue was built from Picasso's design by U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana. Anatol Rychalski was the engineer in charge of the design and construction. "We had to roll steel to sizes which never have been rolled," he remembers. "Which means that the whole technology had to be to some extent improvised at the time." One of the workers commented, "You know, fellas, Picasso might be a great artist, but I tell you: he ain't no welder."

Finally, on August 15, 1967, the city dedicated the statue at a festive ceremony attended by thousands of Chicagoans who had crowded into the Plaza, in front of what was known then as the Chicago Civic Center. Earl Bush, who was Mayor Daley's press secretary, recalls the lowering of the shroud at the unveiling: "I nearly dropped dead because the thing didn't come down right away. But finally it came down and low and behold everybody gasped, "What is it. . .?" The public's response was loud and varied, and the controversy continues to this day.

SOME THOUGHTS ON CHICAGO'S PICASSO by program producer Phil Lanier

There are always surprises in store during any production. Most of them have to do with uncooperative weather, loud noises during interviews or equipment problems. One of the most pleasing surprises in producing Pablo and the Boss, though, was the increased appreciation I gained for the sculpture.

Of course, the temptation is to view the Picasso, as it is affectionately called, from directly in front and from some distance across the plaza. I also know the trick of moving slightly behind and to one side of the sculpture to see the female profile. As I spent time around the Picasso, a piece of art I thought I knew, I began to perceive it differently. Standing directly in front of it, up close, yielded a unique impression. The same was true when I stood directly behind the Picasso or across the street from it.

Then, there were the perceptions of others, people who pass through the plaza or who spend lunch breaks around the sculpture. I became fascinated with their varying interpretations of the Picasso. Sadly, we could use only a few in the program, due to time restrictions, but I hope viewers find their comments as interesting as I did.

Even though the Picasso is not what you might call a "pretty" piece of art, others working on the project found themselves falling under the sculpture's spell. Both the camera operator and the editor found that the more they looked at it, the more they saw, gaining a greater appreciation for the clever complexity of the art as well as the artist.

I suppose it was best summed up by one of the interview subjects, who said to me, "The Picasso is like a good friend. It reveals itself to you little by little as you come to know it."

Phil Lanier is a freelance writer/producer who has worked on everything from travel articles and magazine interviews, to broadcast commercials and documentaries. His 30-second public service announcements for The National Dairy Association and the Illinois Bar Association have frequently won awards. He also served as assistant director and provided the title for a local independent feature film, The Psychotronic Man.

1. Edvard Munch, The Scream, $119.9 million. 2. Pablo Picasso, Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust, $106.5 million. 3. Alberto Giacometti, L'homme qui Marche I, $105.2 million. 4. Pablo Picasso, Boy With a Pipe, $104.2 million. 5. Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II, $87.9 million.