25 October: Pablo Picasso

Artist Pablo Picasso was born on this date in 1881. Here are some things you may not know about Picasso:

1. Picasso was baptised Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, after various saints and relatives.
2. The name Picasso was from his mother's family, not his father's.
3. According to his mother, his first words were "piz, piz", a shortening of lápiz, the Spanish word for "Pencil". When he was seven, his father, an art teacher, began instructing him.
4. A number of very early Picassos were lost when the artist was living in Paris in the 1900s. He was so poor that he had to burn some of his work to keep warm.
5. His love life was complicated. He married twice: Olga Khokhlova in 1918 and Jacqueline Roque in 1961. He had numerous affairs, often with women much younger than he was. The most significant of these was with Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was 17 when they met and he was in his 40s. Both Marie-Thérèse Walter and Jacqueline Roque killed themselves after his death.
6. During the second world war, the French Resistance smuggled bronze to Picasso so he could continue sculpting.
7. He was a writer as well. Between 1935 and 1959 he wrote over 300 erotic poems, and later he wrote two plays, Desire Caught by the Tail (1941) and The Four Little Girls (1949).
8. Picasso's most famous work is his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War – Guernica. Asked to explain its symbolism, Picasso said, "It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them." During the second world war, a Gestapo officer who was searching Picasso's apartment, asked, "Did you do that?" Picasso replied, "No, You did".
9. On 11 May 2015 his painting Women of Algiers set the record for the highest price ever paid for a painting when it sold for US$179.3 million at Christie's in New York.
10. More of his paintings have been stolen than any other artist's. The Art Loss Register has 550 of his works listed as missing.