Picasso, Pablo

A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932

The long-awaited third volume of John Richardson’s definitive biography of Pablo Picasso combines the critical astuteness, exhaustive research, and stunning narrative that made the first two volumes an art-historical breakthrough as well as a pleasure to read.

The Triumphant Years takes up the artist’s life in 1917, when Picasso and Cocteau left wartime Paris for Rome to work with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes on their revolutionary production of Parade. Visits to Naples, above all to the Farnese marbles in the Museo Nazionale, would leave Picasso with a lifelong obsession with classical sculpture as well as the self-referential commedia dell’arte. After returning to Paris and marrying one of Diaghilev’s ballerinas, Olga Khokhlova, he abandoned bohemia for the drawing rooms of Paris. Hence, his so-called Duchess period, which coincided with his switch to neoclassicism, and would ultimately be absorbed into a metamorphic form of cubism.

In the summer of 1923, Picasso and his American friends Gerald and Sara Murphy transformed the French Riviera from a winter into a summer resort, when they persuaded the proprietor of the Hôtel du Cap at Antibes to keep the place open for the summer. In doing so, they made the Riviera Europe’s major playground. Mediterraneanism was in Picasso’s bones. Born in Málaga, he would always identify with this inland sea.

In 1927 the artist’s life underwent a major change; he abandoned society for a life out of the spotlight with a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl, Marie-Thérèse Walter. His erotic obsession with Marie-Thérèse would result in an ever-growing antipathy for his neurasthenic, understandably jealous wife. Balletic clues have enabled Richardson to identify a number of baffling figure-paintings as portrayals of Olga and reinterpret the work of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Picasso’s passionate love for his mistress and his passionate hatred for his wife can be fully understood only in light of each other.

The last three chapters constitute an annus mirabilis—spring 1931 to spring 1932—during which the artist celebrated his fiftieth birthday. Challenged to scale new heights by the passage of time, Picasso lived up to his shamanic belief that painting should have a magic function. In the course of this year, he reinvented sculpture and to a great extent his own imagery in a bid to Picassify the classical tradition. The resultant retrospective in Paris and Zurich in the summer of 1932 confirmed Picasso as the leader of the modern movement.

Picasso & Lump: A Dachshund's Odyssey

One spring morning in 1957, veteran photojournalist David Douglas Duncan paid a visit to his friend and frequent photographic subject Pablo Picasso, at the artistÕs villa near Cannes. As copilot alongside Duncan in his Mercedes Gullwing 300 SL was the photographerÕs dachshund, Lump. Photographer and dog were close companions, but DuncanÕs nomadic lifestyle and his other dog Ñ a giant Afghan hound who had tormented the autocratic and temperamental Lump Ñ made home life in Rome difficult. When they arrived at PicassoÕs Villa La Californie that historic day, Lump decided that he had found paradise on earth, and that he would move in with Picasso, whether the artist wanted him to or not.

This is the background for an utterly original book that offers an uncommonly sensitive portrait of Picasso. Lump was immortalized in a Picasso portrait painted on a plate the day they met, but that was just the beginning. In a suite of 45 paintings reinterpreting Vel‡squezÕs masterpiece Las Meninas, Picasso replaced the impassive hound in the foreground with jaunty renderings of Lump. Fifteen of those paintings are reproduced here in full color, juxtaposed with DuncanÕs dramatic and intimate black-and-white photographs of Picasso and Lump, bringing full circle the odyssey of a fortunate dachshund who found his way from reluctant road warrior to furry and elongated icon of modern art.

A Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel, 1907-1916 (Borzoi Books)

In The Cubist Rebel, 1907–1916, the second volume of his Life of Picasso, John Richardson reveals the young Picasso in the Baudelairean role of “the painter of modern life”—a role that stipulated the brothel as the noblest subject for a modern artist. Hence his great breakthrough painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, with which this book opens. As well as portraying Picasso as a revolutionary, Richardson analyzes the more compassionate side of his genius. The misogynist of posthumous legend turns out to have been surprisingly vulnerable—more often sinned against than sinning. Heartbroken at the death of his mistress Eva, Picasso tried desperately to find a wife. Richardson recounts the untold story of how his two great loves of 1915–17 successively turned him down. These disappointments, as well as his horror at the outbreak of World War I and the wounds it inflicted on his closest friends, Braque and Apollinaire, shadowed his painting and drove him off to work for the Ballets Russes in Rome and Naples—back to the ancient world.

In this volume we see the artist’s life and work during the crucial decade of 1907–17, a period during which Picasso and Georges Braque devised what has come to be known as cubism and in doing so engendered modernism. Thanks to the author’s friendship with Picasso and some of the women in his life, as well as Braque and their dealer, D. H. Kahnweiler, and other associates, he has had access to untapped sources and unpublished material. In The Cubist Rebel, Richardson also introduces us to key figures in Picasso’s life who have been totally overlooked by previous biographers. Among these are the artist’s Chilean patron, collector, and mother figure, Eugenia Errázuriz, as well as two fiancées: the loveable Geneviève Laporte and the promiscuous bisexual painter Irène Lagut.

By harnessing biography to art history, he has managed to crack the code of cubism more successfully than any of his predecessors. And by bringing fresh light to bear on the artist’s private life, he has succeeded in coming up with a new view of this paradoxical man and of his paradoxical work. Never before have Picasso’s revolutionary vision, technical versatility, prodigious achievements, and, not least, his sardonic humor been analyzed with such clarity.

Life with Picasso

Francoise Gilot met Picasso during the German occupation of Paris, she was twenty-one, he was sixty-two.  For nearly a decade, Gilot shared her life with this giant of the art world, giving birth to two of his children, working as his model, and sharing his world.  This uniquely candid and vivid memoir takes readers behind the Piccasso legend to meet the man.

Matisse And Picasso: The Story Of Their Rivalry And Friendship (Icon Editions)

The Ultimate Picasso

If you had to choose just one book about Pablo Picasso, the most protean artist of the 20th century, what would you look for? Copious, good-quality reproductions. An authoritative account of the way his approach to painting was influenced by his personality, the women in his life, and his awareness of art made by others. An in-depth treatment of key works like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (which Picasso memorably called his "first exorcism painting") and signature themes, like the half-man, half-animal Minotaur. Then there's the question of tone. Some books cast Picasso as a demigod or a destroyer. Others, like art historian John Richardson's A Life of Picasso, offer a more balanced, psychologically penetrating portrait of the artist.

Hefty, elegant, and inclusive, The Ultimate Picasso hits most, though not all, of these marks. It offers more than 1,200 reproductions (nearly 800 in color) spanning the artist's entire career. Smoothly translated from the French, the book weaves biographical detail 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 three authors are all experts--Léal and Bernadac are (respectively) present and former curators of the Musée Picasso in Paris, and Piot coauthored the catalogue raisonné of Picasso's sculpture. They clearly explain visual sources, duly acknowledge leading art historians' interpretations, and choose good quotes from contemporaries. Yet the text can be surprisingly skimpy. The 16-page section on Guernica, for example, has barely two pages of discussion about the painting and its genesis. The authors keep an extremely tight focus on their subject, with only as much mention of Picasso's contemporaries or the outside world as is absolutely necessary.

The major flaws, however, are the authors' hyperbolic view of their subject ("Picasso did not paint nature, but the suffering of the men and women of his time, creating from it beauty and truth") and the lack of any psychological insight about the repeated devastation Picasso wreaks on the female form. In this old-fashioned portrait of the male artist as genius, human failings do not exist, unless they belong to somebody else. --Cathy Curtis

Of all the books on the man many consider the greatest genius of 20th-century art, this sumptuous work stands out as truly the "ultimate" Picasso. Not only does it cover in one volume all the periods of Pablo Picasso's long, incredibly versatile career-with exquisite reproductions of nearly every significant work he ever created-but the scholarship is impeccable: each of the three authors is a leading authority on a particular period of Picasso's artistic evolution.

Brigitte Léal 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. Marie-Laure Bernadac discusses the unabashed vigor of Picasso's later years, from 1953 until his death in 1973. Nearly 1,200 magnificent reproductions, 720 in full color, illustrate Picasso's breathtaking range of artistic expression.

Picasso once boasted that a book would have to be written on him every day to keep up with his creative surges. Perhaps. But for art lovers and students seeking just one book, The Ultimate Picasso is unsurpassed.

BRIGITTE LÉAL is a curator at the Muse Picasso in Paris.

CHRISTINE PIOT contributed to the catalogue raisonn of Picasso's sculpture.

MARIE-LAURE BERNADAC is curator of the Muse National d'Art Moderne (the Georges Pompidou Center), Paris. Previously she was curator of the Muse Picasso in Paris.

1,186 illustrations, 720 in full color, 111/2 x 12"

A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881-1906 (Borzoi Books)

As he magnificently combines meticulous scholarship with irresistible narrative appeal, Richardson draws on his close friendship with Picasso, his own diaries, the collaboration of Picasso's widow Jacqueline, and unprecedented access to Picasso's studio and papers to arrive at a profound understanding of the artist and his work. 800 photos.

Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc

Picasso (Big Art)

The genius of the century...

"I wanted to be a painter, and I became Picasso," declared Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) in an apt survey of a triumphant career. He had good grounds for the confidence palpable in his statement, for in the history of 20th century art, his name stands out over all the others. In PicassoÂ’s paintings, drawings, lithographs, ceramics, and sculptures, he was tirelessly inventive and innovative, exhibiting an aesthetic bravado that kept him one step ahead of his contemporaries. From subject matter to new forms and techniques to new media, Picasso got there first. The Spanish artist's enormous output, from the eight-year-old's beginnings to the late work of a man of ninety-one, is surely one of the most diverse and creatively energetic in the whole history of art, and it is no exaggeration to see him as the genius of the century. Carsten-Peter Warncke's study is a thorough review of Picasso's entire oeuvre, from the early Blue and Rose Periods, through the analytic and synthetic cubism and classicist phase all the way up to the art of the old savage Picasso.

Picasso: 16 Art Stickers (Fine Art Stickers)