Pablo Picasso was born Pablo Ruiz on October 25, 1881, the son of Don José Ruiz Blasco. In his early years, he signed his name Ruiz Blasco after his father, but later decided to take his mother's maiden name, Picasso, because he liked the unusual sound of it.

On May 11, 2015, Picasso's Women of Algiers sold for a record-breaking 179.3 million dollars, making it the most expensive painting ever sold.

Picasso's earliest and most famous "period" is known as the Blue Period and, aside from the obvious color reference, features works with moving depictions of acrobats, harlequins, prostitutes, beggars and artists.

Georges Braque, a French painter, was Picasso's partner in the creation of the Cubist style, and in some ways even surpassed Picasso in his innovations during the early development of Analytical Cubism.

Blindness is a recurring theme in Picasso's Blue Period, in works such as The Blindman's Meal (1903), the portrait of Celestina (1903), and The Frugal Repast (1904).

One of Picasso's associates, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, was arrested on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911. Apollinaire fingered Picasso as a suspect, and the artist was also brought in for questioning, but both were later exonerated.

Picasso had a pet monkey named Monina who sat on his shoulder at the dinner table and took everything out of his hands for her own consumption, including his cigarettes, which she would smoke after feeding.

A mural-sized oil painting on canvas using a palette of gray, black, and white, Guernica is Picasso's depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.

As a Spaniard it was inevitable that the bull, the bullfight, and eventually the Minotaur, would concern Picasso. During the 1930s, the minotaur would replace harlequin as a common motif in Picasso's work. His use of the minotaur came partly from his contact with the surrealists, who often used it as their symbol, and it appears in Picasso's Guernica. The minotaur and Picasso's mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter are heavily featured in his celebrated Vollard Suite of etchings.

Les Noces de Pierrette (1905) portrays a group of prosperous families mingling and gossiping at a wedding. However the figures are painted with blank, emotionless faces and hollow eye-sockets. When he finished this piece, Picasso refused to let anyone see it, but his mistress, Fernande Olivier, snuck into his study for a look. She was so disturbed that the couple separated shortly afterwards.