In 1895, at the age of fourteen, Pablo Ruiz Picasso was accepted at the academy of arts ‘La Llotja’ in Barcelona. In 1897, he also studied at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid for a short time. From 1897/98, his works bear the signature "P. Picasso". In 1901, A. Vollard organized the first Picasso exhibition in Paris, where the artist also settled down in 1904. In 1907, he created the famous, epoch-making oil painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon". From 1908 onwards, cubism determined Picasso's work. Around 1918, he turned to a classicist formal language, which lasted until the mid-1920s, when his engagement with surrealism intensified. In 1937, Picasso painted the monumental mural "Guernica" for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair. The Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a retrospective to Picasso in 1939/40, which made him widely known in America and among contemporary art critics and artist colleagues. Picasso's style increasingly reduced to an emphasis on lines and sketches. Highly productive as he was, he not only focused on painting and graphic arts, but also on sculpture and ceramics from 1947. In 1961, he moved to Mougins in the South of France, where he died in 1973, remaining artistically active until the end. With a retrospective exhibition organized by the Louvre on the occasion of his 90th birthday in 1971, Picasso received an honour which until then had not been granted to any living artist.