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It's the name. "Picasso" sounds similar to names like "Michelangelo", "Leonardo (da vinci)", and "Raphael" (short but not too much, easy to remember, and pleasant to the eye/ear). It's also a very uncommon name. Hence why we are tempted to associate a famous painter named "Picasso" with the distant past. Like we would associate a painter named "Jennifer" or "Peter" with more modern times.

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Only sort of; great artists do get referred to by a single name, regardless of the time period. Dali is one such; we aren't shocked at his modernity, because he feels like a modern artist. Matisse lived into the 1950s, Monet into the 1920s. Van Gogh until the 1890s. Picasso is -weird- because he was a contemporary of Monet and Matisse and Cezanne...but also Dali and Pollock and O'Keefe. He was alive, painting, when Andy Warhol was active, for crying out loud.

It's the age, not the name. Picasso feels like a late 1800s, early 1900s master, but he lived so long he saw the moon landing, and was painting the entire time.

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