Born in a family of artisans, he is, along with Picasso, one of the fathers of Cubism. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Le Havre until 1900, when he moved to Paris to finish his studies.

At first he was called by the Fauvist movement, influenced by what he saw at the exhibition of these artists in 1905 in Paris. Two years later he met the work of Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso with his Señoritas de Avinyó, painted that same year, which made him enter the world of Cubism. Thus, he begins to break the classical tradition and paints reality with his characteristic geometric vision. He was evolving to the point of pasting texts in his own works, which led him to create the discipline of collage. Therefore, his cubist work began as an analytical cubism (1907 to 1911) and innovated towards a synthetic cubism (1912 to 1914). With the arrival of the First World War, where the artist participated and was seriously wounded in 1915, his work became more serious and austere, evolving into his own style. The last years of his artistic period are summarized in a set of studio paintings, still lifes or still lifes and bird paintings.

The Suñol Foundation preserves one of his works from his last years called Le Canard (1961). This was exhibited in the collective exhibition of the foundation entitled ‘Sobre (el) papel’ of 2014-15.