The author sets out to capture Picasso's early life in this biography, exploring the originality of his art and ambition. At the heart of the interpretation is Picasso's first great love, Fernande Olivier, with whom the artist lived for seven years - a period which included his most revolutionary works. Fernande is given her own voice by way of excerpts from her candid memoirs. Including the artist's friendships with Apollonaire and Gertrude Stein, the book evokes the atmosphere of bohemian life in Paris in the early 1900s.
One of America's greatest living authors probes the soul and explosive early years of the passionate, driven Pablo Picasso, whose genius was celebrated as rogue, insatiable lover, and conquistador ready for new battles. of color photos.
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.
From first to last, Picasso's prime subject was the human figure and portraiture remained a favourite genre. His earliest portraits were done from life and reveal a precocious ability to catch likeness and suggest character and state of mind. B y 1900 Picasso was producing portraits of astonishing variety and thereafter they reflected the full range of his innovative styles - symbolist, cubist, neoclassica l, surrealist, expressionist. B ut however extreme his departur e from representational conventions, Picasso never wholly abandoned drawing from the sitter or ceased producing portraits of classic beauty and naturalism. For all his radical originality, Picasso remained in constant dialogue with the art of the past and his portraits often alluded to canonical masterpieces, chosen for their appropriateness to the looks and personality of his subject. Treating favourite Old Masters as indecorously as his intimate friends, he enjoyed caricaturing them and indulging in fant asies about their sex lives that mirrored his own obsession with the interaction of eroticism and creativity. His late suites of free ' variations ' after Vel�zquez's Las Meninas and Rembrandt's The Prodigal Son , both of which involve self - portraiture, allow ed him to ruminate on the complex psychological relationship of artist and sitter, and continu ities between past and present. When Picasso depicted people in his intimate circle, the nature of his bond with them inevitably influenced his interpretation. T he focus of this book is not, however, Picasso's life story but his creative process, and, although following a broadly chronological path, its chapters are structured thematically. Issues addressed in depth include Picasso's exploitation of familiar pose s and formats, his sources of inspiration and identification with favourite Old Masters, the role of caricature in his expressive conception of portraiture, the relationship between observation, memory and fantasy, critical differences between his portray al of men and women, and the motivation behind his defiance of decorum and the extreme transformation of his sitter's appearance.
In this book, Mailer sets out to capture the meaning of Picasso's life & art & explores in bold fashion the originality of his ambition. He argues that to understand Picasso in his early years -- a period that included his most revolutionary works -- it is necessary to follow his relationship with the extraordinary Fernande Olivier, with whom he lived for 7 years. She is given her own voice by way of excerpts from her candid memoirs, hitherto unpublished in English. Since this period also includes Picasso's friendships with Apollinaire & Gertrude Stein, the book evokes the charm & special character of bohemian life in Paris in the early 1900s. Illustrated.
Françoise Gilot's candid memoir remains the most revealing portrait of Picasso written, and gives fascinating insight into the intense and creative life shared by two modern artists. Françoise Gilot was in her early twenties when she met the sixty-one-year-old Pablo Picasso in 1943. Brought up in a well-to-do upper-middle-class family, who had sent her to Cambridge and the Sorbonne and hoped that she would go into law, the young woman defied their wishes and set her sights on being an artist. Her introduction to Picasso led to a friendship, a love affair, and a relationship of ten years, during which Gilot gave birth to Picasso’s two children, Paloma and Claude. Gilot was one of Picasso’s muses; she was also very much her own woman, determined to make herself into the remarkable painter she did indeed become. Life with Picasso, written with Carlton Lake and published in 1961, is about Picasso the artist and Picasso the man. We hear him talking about painting and sculpture, his life, his career, as well as other artists, both contemporaries and old masters. We glimpse Picasso in his many and volatile moods, dismissing his work, exultant over his work, entertaining his various superstitions, being an anxious father. But Life with Picasso is not only a portrait of a great artist at the height of his fame; it is also a picture of a talented young woman of exacting intelligence at the outset of her own notable career.
Fernande Olivier was the first real love in the life of Picasso, and the years she spent with the great artist, 1904 to 1912, coincide with some of his most revolutionary work. "Loving Picasso" brings Oliver's memoirs to life with archival photos, reproductions of her own artwork, and a selection of superb portraits of her by Picasso himself. 82 illustrations, 10 in full color.
