Pablo Picasso in five highlights

Picasso worked across several distinct styles rather than settling on one signature look, moving through the melancholic Blue Period, the warmer Rose Period, pioneering Cubism with Georges Braque, then Neoclassicism and Surrealist-influenced painting in his later decades. Each shift changed his color, subject matter, and approach to form.

He fractured and reassembled faces to show several viewpoints of the same subject at once, a technique rooted in Cubism. Rather than copying what the eye sees, he painted from memory and imagination, using distortion to express feeling and psychological depth instead of physical likeness.

No, he stopped short of true abstraction and kept a recognizable subject in almost every piece. Even his most fragmented Cubist paintings retained a figure, an object, or a face underneath the broken shapes, since he believed a painting always had to start from something real.