By the time the police in Paris were asking after the stolen Mona Lisa in 1911, Pablo Picasso was already the man everyone watched. He had arrived in the city in 1900, shared a draughty room with Max Jacob, and burned his own work to keep warm. In those years he was not yet a legend, only a Spaniard making his way through poverty, rivalry, and a head full of new shapes.

He was born at 23:15 on 25 October 1881 in Málaga, Andalusia, the first child of José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. His father taught him figure drawing and oil painting from the age of seven, in the old academic fashion, and the boy’s first words were said to be piz, piz, short for lápiz. In 1895, after his sister Conchita died of diphtheria, the family moved to Barcelona, where he entered the advanced class at 13 after passing the exam in a week.

By 1901 he had begun signing simply Picasso, and his career started to race ahead. He and Francisco de Asís Soler founded Arte Joven in Madrid, then his Blue Period of 1901 to 1904 brought gaunt mothers, beggars, and the grief of his friend Carles Casagemas. In Paris he met Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, Fernande Olivier, and the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and by 1907 he had made Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the shock that opened the road to Cubism.

That road led through Analytic Cubism with Georges Braque, then Synthetic Cubism, where he pasted wallpaper and newspaper into art and made Still Life with Chair Caning in 1912. During the First World War he remained in Paris while Braque, Derain, and Guillaume Apollinaire went off to war. In 1918 he married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina from Sergei Diaghilev’s troupe, and in 1927 he began his affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, who later bore his daughter Maya.

The great turn came in 1937, when Franco’s war in Spain gave him Guernica. Dora Maar photographed the work as he made it, and the black-and-white canvas became his fiercest answer to the bombing of the Basque town by German and Italian air forces. He stayed in Paris through the German occupation of 1940, was harassed by the Gestapo, and when an officer asked if he had done Guernica, Picasso replied, No, you did.

After the war he joined the French Communist Party in 1944, had Claude with Françoise Gilot in 1947 and Paloma in 1949, and kept reinventing himself into old age. He made ceramics with Jacqueline Roque in Vallauris, designed the Chicago Picasso, and in 1971 became the first living artist honoured with a special exhibition at the Louvre. On 8 April 1973, after painting until 3 a.m. at Mougins, he died of a heart attack brought on by pulmonary edema at 11:40 a.m.

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The Man Who Kept Changing Shape