The Chicago Picasso, dedicated on August 15, 1967, has become a well known landmark in Daley Plaza.

In The Three Dancers, Love, sex and death are linked in an ecstatic dance. The painting is laden with Picasso's personal recollections of a triangular affair, which resulted in the heart-broken suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas.

In Le Rêve, or "The Dream", Picasso (then 50 years old) portrayed his 22-year-old mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter. It is said to have been painted in one afternoon, on January 24, 1932.

French symbolist writer Alfred Jarry once gave Picasso a pistol, a little Browning that Picasso always carried in his pocket. When people spoke slightingly of the artist Cézanne, Picasso would lay it on the table and say, "One more word, and I fire." He is also rumored to have fired blanks at those he considered dull.

According to Guinness World Records, Picasso is one of the world's most prolific artists. During his 78-year career, he created over 13,500 paintings or designs, 100,000 prints or engravings, 34,000 book illustrations, and 300 sculptures or ceramics -- totaling over 147,800 works of art.

On May 4, 2004, Picasso's painting Garcon à la Pipe (Boy With a Pipe) was sold for USD $104 million at Sotheby's, establishing a new price record.

In 1918 Picasso married for the first time. His bride, Olga Koklova, was a ballerina and the daughter of a Russian general. Although they eventually separated, the couple remained legally married until Olga's death in 1955 because French law required an equal division of property in the case of divorce--and Picasso didn't want to share his fortune.

Picasso once said, "Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs."

The Picasso Museum opened in the Spring of 1963 in Barcelona, Spain. The museum continued to grow with donations from all over the world and from Picasso himself until his death. The works date from 1890 to 1967 but the best represented period is that of the artist's childhood and youth.

After the Second World War, Picasso joined the French Communist party. His political beliefs, which evolved from his early experiences growing up in near poverty, opened him to sharp criticism, but he didn't budge in his commitment to the ideal of communism.