Ultimate Picasso

Leal, Brigitte

ISBN 10: 0810991144 / ISBN 13: 9780810991149

Published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003

Most items will be dispatched the same or the next working day. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. A few small stains. Seller Inventory # wbs2044375574

Synopsis:

Of all the books on the man many consider the greatest genius of twentieth-century art, this sumptuous work - now available as a compact, affordable paperback - stands out as truly the "ultimate" Picasso. Not only does it cover in one volume all the periods of Picasso's long, incredibly versatile career - with exquisite reproductions of nearly every significant work he ever created - but the scholarship is also impeccable: each of the three authors is a leading authority on a particular period of Picasso's artistic evolution. Brigitte Leal covers Picasso's formative years from 1881 through 1916, a period that includes 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. Over 1200 magnificent reproductions, 798 in full color, illustrate Picasso's breathtaking range of artistic expression, including paintings, drawings, lithographs, ceramics, and sculpture.

Review: 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 contemporaneousness with other notables; an in-depth treatment of key works--like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (his self-proclaimed "first exorcism painting")--and recurrent themes, like the 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 responsible, psychologically penetrating portrait of the artist.

Hefty, elegant, and inclusive, The Ultimate Picasso hits most of these marks. It boasts more than 1,200 reproductions spanning the artist's entire career. Smoothly translated from the French, the it weaves biographical detail and discussions of the art into a concise narrative. Visual sources are all confidently accounted for. Yet the text does seem rather skimpy. The 16-page section on Guernica, for example, has barely two pages of actual discussion. The authors maintain their extremely tight focus on their artist, which is admirable. But in their concentration, they seem to compulsively refrain, perhaps by default, from acknowledging the external world as anything but resource or dalliance for their subject.

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 real psychological insight about, for instance, the continual hazard Picasso poses to the female form, may be considered a flaw. But in this old-fashioned portrait of the male artist as genius, so certain is it of the gulf between the common and the exalted, human flaw does not exist, unless it belongs to somebody else. --Cathy Curtis

Bibliographic Details

Title: Ultimate Picasso
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Publication Date: 2003
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: Very Good