Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is credited with being one of the founding fathers of Modern Art. His approach to painting his subjects from multiple points of view at once is known as Cubism. It was a revolutionary approach which veered away from an artist's traditional interest in replicating nature with verisimilitude. Picasso's career was long a prolific, extending into sculpture and ceramics. His painting Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon is a portrait of four prostitutes and each one becomes less and less naturalistic as Picasso investigated breaking down the planes of depth into a flattened one view. Another painting named Guernica was a large scale canvas which criticized the massive bombing of the Basque capital in Spain by German troops in 1937. Franco and the Nationalists hid their involvement but had wanted to break the Basque resistance. Picasso portrayed similar passion and emotion during his Blue Period in which he painted several of his lovers weeping in a Cubist style. Picasso worked well into his later years as one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

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