Pablo Picasso was one of the most innovative, experimental, prolific, influential, and controversial painters of the twentieth century. An updated and re-designed version of the large-format book published in the year 2000, this small-format Picasso. The Monograph 1881-1973 offers more than 1,200 new-scanned reproductions spanning the artist’s entire career. The three authors are all experts: Léal and Bernadac both former curators of the Musée Picasso in Paris are, at this time and respectively, curators of the Centre Pompidou and the Louvre Museum, and Piot coauthored the catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s sculpture. Brigitte Leal covers Picasso's formative years from 1881 through 1916, including his invention of Cubism with Georges Braque. Christine Piot explores the astonishingly fertile period from 1917 through 1952, and Marie- Laure Bernadac discusses the unabashed vigor of Picasso’s later years, from 1953 until his death in 1973. Smoothly translated from the French, the book weaves biographical details and discussions of the art into a concise narrative. (“Olga became pregnant in the summer of 1920, and in Picasso’s work forms blossomed and flesh took on the massive quality of stone.”).The authors keep an extremely tight focus on their subject, with only as much mention of Picasso’s contemporaries or the outside world as absolutely necessary. The 16-page section on Guernica, for example, has barely two pages of discussion about the painting and its genesis. In short, for any personal or academic art history collection, and for students or community libraries, Picasso. The Monograph 1881-1973 is unsurpassed.
In this generously illustrated and lively book, Christopher Lloyd sets out and interprets the lifelong achievement of Picasso (1881-1973) as a draftsman. Although there have been many publications about his drawings that have tended to focus on particular periods of his career, this stunning volume specifically examines how drawing serves as the vital thread connecting all of Picasso's art, just as it also links his private world with his public persona of which he was becoming increasingly aware in his later years. Picasso and the Art of Drawing ultimately showcases how the basis of the titular artist's style as painter, sculptor, printmaker, and designer was manifestly achieved through drawing. Distributed for Modern Art Press
This biography paints a riveting portrait of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), examining both his strengths and shortcomings as husband, lover, and father. Olivier Widmaier Picasso's unique insight into the life of one of the 20th century's most influential artists details not only Picasso's hopes, fears, and regrets, but also his certainties and commitments, his unique audacity, his happiness, and his conflicts. Picasso: An Intimate Portrait is a detailed study of a lifetime dedicated to art, in which the author skillfully captures the real man at the heart of the many fictions and legends that the artist inspired. This masterful text is illustrated with a wealth of drawings, engravings, paintings, and sculptures, as well as many rarely seen and personal photographs by David Douglas Duncan, Edward Quinn, André Villers, Lucien Clergue, Man Ray, Michel Sima, and Robert Capa, among others.
Picasso may have the most uncanny line since Botticelli. Each medium or style he chose to master, no matter how solid or sculptural, can be seen as line disguised, metamorphic; as the labyrinth to which a single thread is the key. Theoretically, line is infinite; Picasso in his fertility nearly realized that theory in almost a century of ceaseless drawing, whether on paper, zinc, stone, or other media. Here is a sampling, rather than a comprehensive selection, from that plenitude; while nothing could be comprehensive within a single volume, the genius of Picasso's line manifests itself so clearly that this culling from various periods reveals the line in most of its guises. Beginning with a 1905 circus family in drypoint, 44 drawings cover Picasso's major themes, techniques, and styles. From the almost classic Ingresque clarity of the Diaghilev and Stravinsky portraits (1919, 1920) via cubist studies and "neo-classical" nudes, Picasso's restless hand remakes his world again and again with fresh energy, culminating here in six sketches of the artist/model dashed out in raging love/hate in the midst of personal crisis (1953–54). In between are times of serenity and introspection (Seven Dancers (1919), with the future Olga Picasso up front; many figures and bathers) and, particularity as book illustrations, many mythological studies; Eurydice Stung by a Serpent (1930 etching), Dying Minotaur in the Arena (1933), an etching for a 1934 edition of Lysistrata. Balzac is represented by a striking lithographic portrait (1952) and by etching for Vollard's edition of Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu. The sudden appearance of an earthy, hirsute Rembrandt (1934) seems to confirm Picasso's membership in the select group of art history's greatest draughtsmen.