In 1951 LIFE showcased the sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Like Pollock, Giacometti’s works were instantly recognizable. His style was bluntly captured in LIFE’s headline: “Skeletal Sculpture: Artist Whittles Men to Bone.”

The story described how Giacometti arrived what it called his ‘stalagmatic style”:

Sculptor Giacometti, son of Switzerland’s foremost impressionist painter, started out 30 years ago producing conventional statues. But he lost his way among the innumerable details of the head and body which seemed to clutter up and conceal the underlying form of human beings. “I felt I needed to realize the whole,” he says. “A structure, a sharpness….a kind of skeleton in space.” To arrive at this “essence of man,” Giacometti gradually reduced his figures to pin size, then gradually stretched them out again to pipeline silhouettes whose slender fragility suggests the perishable nature of man himself.

For that story Giacometti posed for legendary LIFE staff photographer Gordon Parks. The meeting of these two artists resulted in one of the most popular images for sale in the LIFE photo store.

That image is part of this gallery, as are several other frames that Parks took of Giacometti and of his work. Also included here is a photo of a Giacometti work taken by Yale Joel that cropped up in the background of a LIFE story from 1960 about art collector G. David Thompson. He was one of the most prominent art collectors of the 20th century, and he owned 70 works by Giacometti.

Alberto Giacometti in his studio, surrounded by his sculptures, 1951.

Gordon Parks/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sculptor Alberto Giacometti in Paris, 1951.

Gordon Parks/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti, 1951.

Gordon Parks/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti in his studio, 1951.

Gordon Parks.Life PIcture Collection/Shutterstock

Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti, surrounded by sculptures in his studio, 1951.

Gordon Parks/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Giacometti sculpture on a Parisian street, 1951.

Gordon Parks/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

These Giacometti animal sculptures lived not far from Giacometti’s Paris studio, 1951.

Gordon Parks/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sculptor Alberto Giacometti, 1951.

Gordon Parks/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Art collector G. David Thompson, 1959, with a Giacometti sculpture; he owned 70 works by the artist.

Yale Joel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post Gordon Parks on Alberto Giacometti and his “Skeletons in Space” appeared first on LIFE.

Of course, scores of towering 20th-century artists (Matisse, O’Keeffe, de Kooning, Chagall and on and on) enjoyed prolific, long-lived careers. But Picasso really is the face of 20th century art, the archetypal, self-reinventing creative force whose most renowned works Old Guitarist (1903), the gorgeous harlequin paintings of his Rose Period, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Guernica (1937) became defining, totemic emblems of the eras in which they were made.

Here, LIFE.com celebrates the Modernist master’s career with a series of pictures by photographer Gjon Mili made over roughly two decades in the middle part of the last century. Mili, a daring technical innovator himself, first visited Picasso at Vallauris, in the South of France, in 1949. When the photographer showed the artist some pictures he’d made of ice skaters with tiny lights affixed to their skates, leaping in the dark, the Spanish genius was intrigued and lent his own special twist to a series of portraits made with the same general technique. (See slides 10, 11 and 12.)

“Picasso” LIFE magazine reported at the time, “gave Mili 15 minutes to try one experiment. He was so fascinated by the result that he posed for five sessions, projecting 30 drawings of centaurs, bulls, Greek profiles and his signature. Mili took his photographs in a darkened room, using two cameras, one for side view, another for front view. By leaving the shutters open, he caught the light streaks swirling through space.”

Mili would revisit Picasso again through the years, each time encountering yet another side of the man while also documenting the artwork that seemed to pour forth in an unending torrent from Picasso’s tireless imagination.

In 1967, for example, Mili returned to the South of France, where Picasso was living, in Mougins, with his second wife, Jacqueline Roque. Inside the artist’s workshop, he found a few small metal monkeys that Picasso had fashioned, seemingly on a whim (see slide #8). LIFE described Picasso’s technique in creating these wonderful, playful sculptures: “He made paper cut-outs, then had the patterns transferred to sheet metal which he folded into animals with lively personalities, turning his paper-thin material into surprisingly substantial works of art.”

Meeting Picasso could be an overwhelming experience, as LIFE’s managing editor George P. Hunt wrote in a 1968 special issue of the magazine devoted entirely to the artist:

To see Picasso for the first time is to see, under that bald brow and pate, two extraordinary deep-brown eyes. They are strangely big for the face. And they change as you watch him talk and listen, so noticeably changing with the reflections of what passes through his mind, perhaps racing back into experience to enrich the present. They brood. They make mischief, they are friendly, offended, hostile, arrogant, bored, then suddenly interested. Mostly, during our visit, they laughed.

Like so many other artists, however, Picasso was hardly a saint. His long-time muse, Françoise Gilot (pictured in this gallery in slides 14 and 16), left Picasso in 1953, and in 1964 she wrote a tell-all memoir of their time together. With its less-than-flattering tales of his incessant affairs and titanic insecurities, her book so angered Picasso that he spitefully refused to see their children, Claude and Paloma, ever again. (By 1970, Gilot had married another world-famous genius: American virologist Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine.)

While hardly providing an exhaustive portrait of one of the West’s seminal creative figures, the pictures in this gallery nevertheless offer an inkling of Picasso’s protean genius, and an intimate look at some of the places where that genius bore such singularly influential, and beautiful, fruit.

Pablo Picasso, Vallauris, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Colleciton/Shutterstock

Interior of Picasso’s workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Interior of Picasso’s workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Picasso’s workbench with notes, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso in a room displaying his pottery work, Vallauris, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

‘Woman With Baby Carriage,’ Picasso’s workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Picasso’s workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Picasso’s workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso, Vallauris, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso draws with light, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso draws with light, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso draws with light, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bronze replicas of Picasso’s elongated wood statuettes sit on a table in his Mougins workshop; out the window, a sculpture of a dog (1967).

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s mistress, with their young son, Claude. She holds drawings of the boy by Picasso. Vallauris, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso, Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Picasso’s one-time muse, the artist Françoise Gilot, poses with a red gladiola, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Inside Picasso’s home in Mougins, flowers and paintings surround two portraits taken by LIFE photographer David Douglas Duncan—one of the artist (left) and one of his wife, Jacqueline Roque (1927 – 1986), and their dog.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso, Côte d’Azur, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso’s authorization for Gjon Mili to photograph his artworks, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso in minotaur mask, Côte d’Azur, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso in minotaur mask, Côte d’Azur, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Double-exposure portrait of Pablo Picasso in his studio, Vallauris, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post LIFE With Picasso: Genius at Work and at Play, 1948-1967 appeared first on LIFE.

Here, LIFE.com presents a selection of Kessel’s pictures of the scenes inside what LIFE unhesitatingly called “the world’s top museum”—a title to which, even today, six decades later, the wonderful, storied, glorious Louvre can arguably still lay claim.

Aerial view of the Louvre and the Tuileries Garden, 1953.

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the Louvre, 1953.

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Patrons view Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the Louvre, 1953.

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Raft of the Medusa, the Louvre

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Children take notes during a discussion of ancient Greek pottery at the Louvre, 1953.

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Venus de Milo, the Louvre, 1953.

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Married couple and their young daughter view the crown of King Louis XV at the Louvre, 1953.

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Louvre, 1953.

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Loading statue, worker places Roman carving of athlete on carriage to be taken to workshop where legs, put on by an earlier restorer, will be removed.”

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Artists scrutinize their versions of a Titian portrait (left) and the Mona Lisa (right), Louvre, 1953.

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Louvre, 1953.

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dusting a sculpture at the Louvre

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Painting of Jeanne d’Aragon by Raphael at the Louvre.

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Apollon gallery at the Louvre.

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The post LIFE Goes to the Louvre, 1953 appeared first on LIFE.