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Pablo Picasso: 10 quotes on his birthday

Pablo Picasso was born on Oct. 25, 1881 in Malaga, Spain. His father was an artist who taught his son to draw and paint from an early age. By the time he was 13, Picasso had surpassed his father. Despite his youth his extraordinary application won him a place at Barcelona's prestigious School of Fine Arts. At age 16 he moved to Madrid to attend the Royal Academy of San Fernando, but spent much of his time skipping classes and wandering the city to paint. When he moved back to Barcelona in 1899, Picasso joined a group of artists and intellectuals. He began to move away from classical painting methods in which he had been trained and began to experiment and innovate in his art. In 1907 Picasso painted "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," the painting which many point to as the forerunner of and inspiration for Cubism. Picasso went on to become one of the most celebrated and influential painters of the 20th century. A revolutionary artist, Picasso had the vision and the courage to try things that had never been done before and he was not afraid to keep changing. As Picasso himself explained it: “Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should." 

1. All children are artists

Photo: public domain

  • By Elizabeth Drake Monitor contributor

"All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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