It’s clear that Picasso’s shadow looms large over 20th-century art. His innovations in form, composition, and conceptual freedom directly influenced—and often ignited—the creative paths of countless artists. But a select group didn’t just borrow from Picasso; they absorbed his breakthroughs, internalized them, and then pushed further, creating their own distinct voices in the process.
Here are some of the most important artists who followed Picasso’s lead, built upon his legacy, and expanded the visual language of modern art:
Georges Braque
Key Influence: Co-founder of Cubism
Braque and Picasso were inseparable collaborators during the early 1910s. While Picasso often gets more credit, Braque’s contributions were foundational. Together, they dismantled Renaissance perspective and created a system of fractured forms and shifting viewpoints. Braque stayed closer to Cubism throughout his life, developing it with a quieter, more introspective tone than Picasso’s brash energy.
Juan Gris
Key Influence: Synthetic Cubism
Gris took Picasso’s Cubist experiments and refined them with mathematical precision and clarity. While Picasso was spontaneous and fluid, Gris was architectural and orderly. His compositions are structured, often brighter, and laid groundwork for future abstraction, including movements like Purism and Minimalism.
Henri Matisse
Key Influence: Rival and counterpart
Though Matisse and Picasso were stylistic opposites, their rivalry pushed both to innovate. Matisse responded to Picasso’s Cubist breakdown of form with bold color and flattened space. Later, his cut-outs—simplified, color-driven compositions—echoed Picasso’s reductionist impulse. Matisse, in his own way, helped channel Picasso’s energy into new visual territory.
Willem de Kooning
Key Influence: Gestural abstraction
De Kooning absorbed Picasso’s distortion of the human figure, especially the angular, aggressive forms of the Demoiselles d’Avignon. His own Woman series merges Cubist structure with Abstract Expressionist brushwork—violent, erotic, and raw. He turned Picasso’s figural fragmentation into something feral and explosive.
Francis Bacon
Key Influence: Psychological distortion
Bacon took Picasso’s deconstruction of the human body and infused it with existential dread. His figures are twisted, screaming, fleshy specters. The inspiration from Picasso’s early surrealist and grotesque imagery is clear, but Bacon made it brutally emotional and entirely his own.
David Hockney
Key Influence: Multiperspective space
Hockney openly credits Picasso for freeing him from conventional perspective. In his later work—especially his photographic collages and massive landscapes—Hockney explores simultaneous viewpoints, much like Picasso did in Cubism. But Hockney uses this to evoke time, memory, and observation in a deeply personal way.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Key Influence: Visual language and childlike immediacy
Basquiat admired Picasso’s ability to combine raw, primitive energy with sophisticated technique. Like Picasso, Basquiat collapsed high and low culture, merging African visual traditions with Western art history. His graffiti-infused canvases echo Picasso’s impulsiveness, symbolic layering, and fearless distortion.
Pablo Picasso’s Influence in a Sentence:
He taught artists not just how to see differently, but that they could—and should—tear down the rules and rebuild them from instinct, rebellion, and truth.
These artists didn’t mimic Picasso. They metabolized him. Each one, in breaking new ground, kept alive the Picasso ethos: that art must evolve, must provoke, and must always ask—what if we did it completely differently?