National Geographic Original Edition - No. 4 / 2018

[English page]

In This Month's Issue:

Nearly half a century after this death, the iconic artist Pablo Picasso continues to bewitch, confuse, entice, and provoke.

From his early days as an artist, Picasso shattered our most primal understanding of the world with his fractured faces and splintered perspectives. He worked voraciously, reinventing his style at a rapid pace—his blue and rose periods, the African period, cubism, surrealism—and created thousands of sculptures, drawings, copperplate etchings, ceramics, and paintings.

Just as Albert Einstein envisioned gravitational ripples in the cosmos, Picasso saw undulations in our world, long before we saw them ourselves.

In the May issue of National Geographic magazine, we explore the enduring questions surrounding Picasso, Einstein, and other geniuses: How does a person evolve from newborn to mastermind? And how can a single soul redefine the way we see?

Picasso’s world was particularly supportive of his developing creativity. His family cultivated his creative passion, he was intellectually curious and gritty, he had clusters of peers who inspired him, and he had the good fortune to be born at a time (1881) when new ideas in science, literature, and music energized his work. Meanwhile, the advent of mass media catapulted him to fame. The traits that promoted his creations—his infatuation with his work and his rule breaking—led to praise and cultlike worship. But they also tainted Picasso’s relationships, sometimes to the point of ruin.

Picasso is also the focus of a 10-part television series, starting April 24 on the National Geographic Channel. It’s the second season of the channel’s Genius series, which in its first season examined Einstein’s life and times.