Spanish painter, sculptor, and printmaker, the single most consequential visual artist of the 20th century — with Georges Braque the inventor of Cubism (1907–14), the decisive presence in the first generations of modernist painting and sculpture, and the author of one of the most widely recognized political paintings ever made: Guernica (1937), the nine-meter mural painted in five weeks for the Spanish Republican pavilion at the Paris International Exposition in response to the German Condor Legion's bombing of the Basque town of Gernika on 26 April 1937.
The political dimension of Picasso's work is less continuous than Kollwitz's or Rivera's but at key moments is decisive. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) — sometimes read as a composition about a Barcelona brothel — opens an argument with the European visual tradition that runs through every later movement. The interwar period stays closer to mythology and private life; the Spanish Civil War changes this. Guernica was commissioned in January 1937, reconceived on hearing news of the bombing, completed in June, and toured abroad through the remainder of the war to raise funds for the Republic; Picasso refused to allow it to return to Spain until democracy was restored, which happened finally in 1981. The painting's iconographic vocabulary — the bull, the horse, the lamp-bearing figure, the screaming mother with dead child, the fallen soldier, the severed arm — became, in the second half of the 20th century, a nearly universal visual shorthand for the civilian cost of modern warfare.
After the war Picasso joined the French Communist Party (October 1944), remained a member until his death, and designed the Dove of Peace poster for the 1949 World Peace Congress; the dove too passed almost immediately into international use. The Charnel House (1945), on the Nazi camps, and Massacre in Korea (1951) extended the political line. His reputation as a political artist should not be overstated — the bulk of his output is not political in any direct sense — but the works that are political are unusually consequential, and his sheer productivity (over 20,000 works across painting, sculpture, ceramics, prints, and stage design) means his influence on 20th-century visual culture is uncommonly thorough.
Picasso is on the graph less for his formal innovations than for the fact that the twentieth-century artist most associated with the Spanish Civil War, the antifascist cause of the 1930s, and the peace campaigns of the 1950s produced Guernica, the single most widely recognized political image of the century. The purely formalist reading of modernism has always been incomplete, and Picasso is the hinge on which that argument turns.