Master artist Pablo Ruiz y Picasso (1881-1973) was born on this day in Malaga, Spain. "My work is like a diary," he said. "To understand it, you have to see how it mirrors life."

Considered one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, his extraordinary output of over 20,000 works included painting, sculpture, graphic art, and ceramics. As soon as he mastered one style, he impatiently went on to the next.

"If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes," he once said.

The son of an art professor, Picasso was "born with a pencil in his hand," and sketched powerful portraits at 14. Four years later, he was a commercial and artistic success.

With passion, the maverick condemned "art for art's sake" and turned his back on a conventional career. He thumbed his nose at the artistic establishment. Taste, he said was "the enemy of creativeness."

With the creation of his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Picasso embarked on the creative revolution of Cubism--an abstract, controversial style that completely altered the way the world was represented. In mocking perspective of multiple views, Picasso forced the world to look and see.

Poet Guilliaume Apollinaire defined Cubism as "the art of depicting new wholes with formal elements borrowed not only from the reality of vision, but from that of conception."

Naming Picasso one of the 20th century's Top 100 remarkable people, Time magazine praised, "No painter or sculptor, not even Michelangelo, had been as famous as this in his own lifetime. And it is quite possible that none ever will be again."

"I do not seek," the volatile genius claimed. "I find."

More PICASSO Quotations

Love, and be loved.