Picasso has often been called the greatest artist of this century. This biography defines his greatness: his accomplishment and versatility as a painter, sculptor, graphic artist, ceramicist, and designer. Most of the innovations in twentieth century art are associated not only with his work but with the legend he built of himself as the quintessential modern artist. Rollyson, an experienced biographer who has taught Picasso in college classrooms, explores the artist?s early years in Spain, the treatment of women in his art and his life, and the influence of contemporary French writers on his experimentation with a number of different styles . Picasso?s greatest works of art, such as ?Les Demoiselles D?Avignon? and ?Guernica? become focal points of this biography, establishing the artist?s central place in international culture. Rollyson concludes with an assessment of Picasso's importance and the qualities of his best work that are likely to continue to influence artists in the future. With a detailed timeline, annotated bibliography, videography, glossary, and listing of important websites, this biography is the place to start for an introduction to Picasso?s life and work.

Author: Carl Rollyson
Paperback: 88 pages
Company: iUniverse (2009-03-27)
ISBN: 144013247X
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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.

Author: John Richardson
Paperback: 548 pages Deckle Edge
Company: Knopf (2007-10-16) (2007-10-16)
ISBN: 037571149X
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"The best biography of Picasso."—Kenneth Clark

Patrick O'Brian's outstanding biography of Picasso is here available in paperback for the first time. It is the most comprehensive yet written, and the only biography fully to appreciate the distinctly Mediterranean origins of Picasso's character and art.

Everything about Picasso, except his physical stature, was on an enormous scale. No painter of the first rank has been so awe-inspiringly productive. No painter of any rank has made so much money. A few painters have rivaled his life span of ninety years, but none has attracted so avid, so insatiable, a public interest.

Patrick O'Brian knew Picasso sufficiently well to have a strong sense of his personality. The man that emerges from this scholarly, passionate, and brilliantly written biography is one of many contradictions: hard and tender, mean and generous, affectionate and cold, private despite the relish of his fame. In his later years he professed communism, yet in O'Brian's view retained to the end of his life a residual Catholic outlook.

Not that such matters were allowed to interfere with his vigorous sensuality. Sex and money, eating and drinking, friends and quarrels, comedies and tragedies, suicides and wars tumble one another in the vast chaos of his experience. he was "a man almost as lonely as the sun, but one who glowed with much the same fierce, burning life." It is with that impression of its subject that this book leaves its readers.


Author: Patrick O'Brian
Paperback: 512 pages
Company: W. W. Norton & Company (1994-03-17)
ISBN: 0393311074
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Simon Packard didn't always want to do his artist report on Pablo Picasso, but after his twin brother Stephen does a report on Monet-Simon's favorite artist-Simon chooses Picasso by default! Throughout, there are reproductions of Pablo Picasso's masterpieces as well as Simon's own drawings, and wonderful nuggets of info that will appeal to kids.

Author: True Kelley
Mass Market Paperback: 32 pages
Company: Grosset & Dunlap (2002-12-30) (2002-12-30)
ISBN: 0448428628
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   At the height of his powers, Pablo Picasso was the artist as revolutionary, breaking through the niceties of form in order to mount a direct challenge to the values of his time. At the height of his fame, he was the artist as royalty: incalculably wealthy, universally idolized−and wholly isolated.
   In this stunning critical assessment, John Berger−one of this century's most insightful cultural historians−trains his penetrating gaze upon this most prodigious and enigmatic painter and on the Spanish landscape and very particular culture that shpaed his life and work. Writing with a novelist's sensuous evocation of character and detail, and drawing on an erudition that embraces history, politics, and art, Berger follows Picasso from his childhood in Malaga to the Blue Period and Cubism, from the creation of Guernica to the pained etchings of his final years. He gives us the full measure of Picasso's triumphs and an unsparing reckoning of their cost−in exile, in loneliness, and in a desolation that drove him, in his last works, into an old man's furious and desperate frenzy at the beauty of what he could no longer create.

Author: John Berger
Paperback: 220 pages
Company: Vintage (1993-11-30) (1993-11-30)
ISBN: 0679737251
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In 1906, Harriet Levy was talked into moving to Paris by her friend Alice B. Toklas and suddenly found herself immersed in a strange world peopled by artists who spoke a language she could not understand--a colorful world that she could only remotely observe in black and white.

Paris Portraits is a short masterpiece. This sparkling manuscript, long hidden in the archives of the University of California's Bancroft Library, brings to life a vibrant and mythic time and place. Through Harriet's eyes, we circulate among the artists and patrons in the salons of Gertrude and Sarah Stein, overhear conversations between the up-and-coming Matisse and his students, and see Gertrude Stein's reaction when she learns of Picasso putting his hand on Toklas's knee. We're present when, while reading the poetry of Tagore, Harriet looks up and for the first time, sees--really sees and understands with the heart--what Matisse is doing.

Paris Portraits enables us to visit, however briefly, a world that has left its mark on our imaginations and will inspire those generations of writers, poets, and artists to come.

Author: Harriet Lane Levy
Hardcover: 120 pages
Company: Heyday (2011-05-01)
ISBN: 1597141577
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Now in paperback: the third volume of John Richardson’s magisterial Life of Picasso.

Here is Picasso at the height of his powers in Rome and Naples, producing the sets and costumes with Cocteau for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and visiting Pompei where the antique statuary fuel his obsession with classicism; in Paris, creating some of his most important sculpture and painting as part of a group that included Braque, Apollinaire, Miró, and Breton; spending summers in the South of France in the company of Gerald and Sara Murphy, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. These are the years of his marriage to the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova—the mother of his only legitimate child, Paulo—and of his passionate affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was, as well, his model and muse.

A groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.

Author: John Richardson
Paperback: 608 pages
Company: Knopf (2010-10-12) (2010-10-12)
ISBN: 0375711511
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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.

Author: John Richardson
Paperback: 512 pages
Company: Knopf (2007-10-16) (2007-10-16)
ISBN: 0375711503
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Author: True Kelley
Paperback: 112 pages ISBN13: 9780448449876, Condition: New, Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Company: Grosset & Dunlap (2009-10-29) (2009-10-29)
ISBN: 0448449870
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Powerfully capturing his charismatic magnetism and obsessive passion, Picasso is the most intimate portrait ever of the man whose life and work are a personification of this tumultuous century. To be a six-hour ABC miniseries from the producer of Roots and The Thorn Birds. 32 pages of photos.

Author: Arianna Huffington
Paperback: 558 pages
Company: HarperCollins (1996-10-21) (1996-10-21)
ISBN: 0380729474
List Price: $15.00
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