Art by Pablo Picasso

Picasso reportedly could draw before he could talk, and by 13 he'd already outpaced his own father, a painter and art teacher who, according to family legend, gave up painting entirely once he saw what his son could do. Picasso co-invented Cubism with Georges Braque around 1909, a partnership Braque later compared to two mountaineers roped together, and moved through it and several other completely distinct phases (Blue, Rose, Neoclassical) over a career that produced an estimated 50,000 works across painting, sculpture, ceramics, and printmaking.

Guernica (1937), his response to the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, stayed at MoMA in New York for decades at Picasso's own request, on the condition that it not go to Spain until democracy returned there; it finally did in 1981. In April 2026, a Paris sales engineer named Ari Hodara won a Picasso gouache worth roughly $1 million in a charity raffle, after buying a single €117 ticket to support Alzheimer's research, one of 120,000 tickets sold in an event that's now run three times. He said he planned to keep it.