Following Pablo Picasso's death in 1973, André Malraux was summoned by Jacqueline Picasso, the artist's widow, to her home at Mougins in the South of France. There, surrounded by Picasso's powerful last paintings "painted face to face with death," and his art collection destined for the Louvre, Malraux recollected Picasso's rebellious life and the metamorphosis of his art. In Picasso's Mask, Malraux's memories, at once personal and historical, evoke Picasso as a private man and as a legendary artistic genius. For over half a century, André Malraux (1901–1976) was intimately involved in French intellectual life, as philosopher, novelist, soldier, statesman, and secretary for cultural affairs. Malraux knew Picasso well, and here recollects a number of his conversations with the painter. In rich, evocative, and memory-filled prose, he has written an inspiring and moving reminiscence. Picasso's Mask is one of the most profound works in Malraux's remarkable oeuvre.
In Picasso's Demoiselles, eminent art historian Suzanne Preston Blier uncovers the previously unknown history of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, one of the twentieth century's most important, celebrated, and studied paintings. Drawing on her expertise in African art and newly discovered sources, Blier reads the painting not as a simple bordello scene but as Picasso's interpretation of the diversity of representations of women from around the world that he encountered in photographs and sculptures. These representations are central to understanding the painting's creation and help identify the demoiselles as global figures, mothers, grandmothers, lovers, and sisters, as well as part of the colonial world Picasso inhabited. Simply put, Blier fundamentally transforms what we know about this revolutionary and iconic work.
Although he never set foot in Africa, Picasso had a passion for African art. Throughout the course of his life, he assembled a unique collection of statues and masks. Comprising more than 120 objects, Picasso's private collection can now be found in museums in Paris such as the Louvre, Musee Quai Branly and the Musee Picasso, as well as in the private collections of members of Picasso's family. This beautiful book documents the entire collection and examines it as a whole. It features documentary photographs, a section of stunning colour plates, and detailed ethnographic descriptions of each piece, providing a full account of Picasso's relationship with African and Oceanic art. This important publication sheds new light on the fascination non-Western art held for one of twentieth century's most important artists. Review: '...an illuminating and handsome book, copiously illustrated with fascinating original documents and excellent colour reproductions...''... a convenient and also essential reference tool for anyone interested in this important subject.''... an invaluable and also entertaining guide.''... this book not only investigates Picasso's response to tribal art with unusual thoroughness, but also reopens the larger question of the artist's 'primitivism'.'The Burlington Magazine, June 2007
This is the first critical examination of Pablo Picasso's use of religious imagery and the religious import of many of his works with secular subject matter. Though Picasso was an avowed atheist, his work employs spiritual themesÑand, often, traditional religious iconography. In five engagingly written, accessible chapters, Jane Daggett Dillenberger and John Handley address Picasso's cryptic 1930 painting of the Crucifixion; the artist's early life in the Catholic church; elements of transcendence in Guernica; Picasso's later, fraught relationship with the church, which commissioned him in the 1950s to paint murals for the Temple of Peace chapel in France; and the centrality of religious themes and imagery in bullfighting, the subject of countless Picasso drawings and paintings.
A Schneider Family Book Award Honor Book for Teens "Raw and unflinching . . . A must-read!" --Marieke Nijkamp, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of This Is Where It Ends "[It] cuts to the heart of our bogus ideas of beauty." –Scott Westerfeld, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Uglies I am ugly. There's a mathematical equation to prove it. At only eight months old, identical twin sisters Ariel and Zan were diagnosed with Crouzon syndrome -- a rare condition where the bones in the head fuse prematurely. They were the first twins known to survive it. Growing up, Ariel and her sister endured numerous appearance-altering procedures. Surgeons would break the bones in their heads and faces to make room for their growing organs. While the physical aspect of their condition was painful, it was nothing compared to the emotional toll of navigating life with a facial disfigurement. Ariel explores beauty and identity in her young-adult memoir about resilience, sisterhood, and the strength it takes to put your life, and yourself, back together time and time again.
One of The Christian Science Monitor’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2018 “An engrossing read…a historically and psychologically rich account of the young Picasso and his coteries in Barcelona and Paris” (The Washington Post) and how he achieved his breakthrough and revolutionized modern art through his masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In 1900, eighteen-year-old Pablo Picasso journeyed from Barcelona to Paris, the glittering capital of the art world. For the next several years he endured poverty and neglect before emerging as the leader of a bohemian band of painters, sculptors, and poets. Here he met his first true love and enjoyed his first taste of fame. Decades later Picasso would look back on these years as the happiest of his long life. Recognition came first from the avant-garde, then from daring collectors like Leo and Gertrude Stein. In 1907, Picasso began the vast, disturbing masterpiece known as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Inspired by the painting of Paul Cézanne and the inventions of African and tribal sculpture, Picasso created a work that captured the disorienting experience of modernity itself. The painting proved so shocking that even his friends assumed he’d gone mad, but over the months and years it exerted an ever greater fascination on the most advanced painters and sculptors, ultimately laying the foundation for the most innovative century in the history of art. In Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World, Miles J. Unger “combines the personal story of Picasso’s early years in Paris—his friendships, his romances, his great ambition, his fears—with the larger story of modernism and the avant-garde” (The Christian Science Monitor). This is the story of an artistic genius with a singular creative gift. It is “riveting…This engrossing book chronicles with precision and enthusiasm a painting with lasting impact in today’s art world” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), all of it played out against the backdrop of the world’s most captivating city.
The Dialect of Modernism uncovers the crucial role of racial masquerade and linguistic imitation in the emergence of literary modernism. Rebelling against the standard language, and literature written in it, modernists, such as Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams reimagined themselves as racial aliens and mimicked the strategies of dialect speakers in their work. In doing so, they made possible the most radical representational strategies of modern literature, which emerged from their attack on the privilege of standard language. At the same time, however, another movement, identified with Harlem, was struggling to free itself from the very dialect the modernists appropriated, at least as it had been rendered by two generations of white dialect writers. For writers such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, this dialect became a barrier as rigid as the standard language itself. Thus, the two modern movements, which arrived simultaneously in 1922, were linked and divided by their different stakes in the same language. In The Dialect of Modernism, Michael North shows, through biographical and historical investigation, and through careful readings of major literary works, that however different they were, the two movements are inextricably connected, and thus, cannot be considered in isolation. Each was marked, for good and bad, by the other.
A lively and accessible history of Modernism, The First Moderns is filled with portraits of genius, and intellectual breakthroughs, that richly evoke the fin-de-siècle atmosphere of Paris, Vienna, St. Louis, and St. Petersburg. William Everdell offers readers an invigorating look at the unfolding of an age. "This exceptionally wide-ranging history is chock-a-block with anecdotes, factoids, odd juxtapositions, and useful insights. Most impressive. . . . For anyone interested in learning about late 19th- and early 20th- century imaginative thought, this engagingly written book is a good place to start."—Washington Post Book World "The First Moderns brilliantly maps the beginning of a path at whose end loom as many diasporas as there are men."—Frederic Morton, The Los Angeles Times Book Review "In this truly exciting study of the origins of modernist thought, poet and teacher Everdell roams freely across disciplinary lines. . . . A brilliant book that will prove useful to scholars and generalists for years to come; enthusiastically recommended."—Library Journal, starred review "Everdell has performed a rare service for his readers. Dispelling much of the current nonsense about 'postmodernism,' this book belongs on the very short list of profound works of cultural analysis."—Booklist "Innovative and impressive . . . [Everdell] has written a marvelous, erudite, and readable study."-Mark Bevir, Spectator "A richly eclectic history of the dawn of a new era in painting, music, literature, mathematics, physics, genetics, neuroscience, psychiatry and philosophy."—Margaret Wertheim, New Scientist "[Everdell] has himself recombined the parts of our era's intellectual history in new and startling ways, shedding light for which the reader of The First Moderns will be eternally grateful."—Hugh Kenner, The New York Times Book Review "Everdell shows how the idea of "modernity" arose before the First World War by telling the stories of heroes such as T. S. Eliot, Max Planck, and Georges Serault with such a lively eye for detail, irony, and ambiance that you feel as if you're reliving those miraculous years."—Jon Spayde, Utne Reader
El autor aborda la estructura pictórica y escultórica y, sobre todo, la arquitectura del conocimiento y de la sociedad en la obra de Picasso, es decir, las estructuras de la tradición, de las diferencias raciales, sociales y culturales, de la lógica y de la tecnología, proponiendo nuevas vías para apreciar la oscilación entre orden y desorden en la obra de Picasso, así como la confrontación y el reto que su obra supuso respecto a las arquitecturas de la ortodoxia. Tal reto comienza con una serie de intervenciones que el artista protagonizó en la turbulenta historia europea de los primeros años veinte, que revelan su postura respecto a temas vitales como la raza, la diferencia cultural, la modernidad, la sexualidad y el descontento de la civilización.
