Pablo Picasso

For most of his life, Pablo Picasso was an international, media-magnified celebrity — "the world's greatest painter." He was charming (women loved him; he mistreated them), controversial (in his personal life as well as his art) and enormously productive (creating more than 20,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures). In short, said critic Robert Hughes, Picasso was "the artist with whom virtually every other artist had to reckon."

And in his later years, Picasso had to reckon with himself. After all, he was the painter of the revolutionary Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , the co-creator (with Georges Braque) of perspective-scrambling...