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.

Author: David Douglas Duncan
Hardcover:  100 pages
Company: Bulfinch  (2006-05-17)
ISBN: 0821258109
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Presents a biography of Picasso

Author: Mike Venezia
Paperback:  32 pages
Company: Children's Press(CT)  (1988-09)
ISBN: 0516422715
List Price: $6.95
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Here is the fascinating story -- based on true fact -- of a world-famous artist and a little girl who became one of his models. Sylvette first met Picasso in 1954, when she was a girl in the southern French town of Vallauris. At that time, she was the shyest and dreamiest girl among her friends, though today, she is a respected artist in her own right. When Picasso set up his studio in a nearby house, he spotted young Sylvette and was taken immediately by her classical profile and her lovely ponytail. When at last he convinced her to pose for what became the first of more than forty works of art, the two gradually became good friends. Before long, Picasso's portraits of Sylvette became famous around the world.

Author and illustrator, Laurence Anholt, captures the spirit of this warm-hearted story in words and pictures. In the process he also introduces several of Picasso's most famous paintings. Young readers will be intrigued to see how Picasso transformed Sylvette's image into a variety of fantastic and whimsical forms. (Ages 4-7).

Author: Laurence Anholt
Hardcover:  32 pages
Company: Barron's Educational Series  (1998-09-01)
ISBN: 0764150316
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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.

Author: John Richardson
Hardcover:  608 pages
Company: Knopf  (2007-11-13) (2007-11-13)
ISBN: 0307266656
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Of all the books on the man many consider the greatest genius of 20th-century art, the sumptuous hardcover volume published by Abrams in 2000 stands out as truly the "ultimate" Picasso. This new paperback edition includes everything in the previous book, in a smaller, reader-friendly format. It covers in one volume all the periods of Picasso's long, incredibly versatile career, with exquisite reproductions of nearly every significant work he ever created and texts by leading authorities on particular periods of Picasso's artistic evolution.

Brigitte Léal 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. More than 1,200 magnificent reproductions, almost 800 in full color, illustrate Picasso's breathtaking range of artistic expression, including paintings, drawings, lithographs, ceramics, and sculpture. Picasso once boasted that a book would have to be written every day to keep up with his creative output. Perhaps. But for art lovers and students seeking just one book, The Ultimate Picasso is unsurpassed.

Author: Brigitte Leal, Christine Piot, Marie-Laure Bernadac
Paperback:  552 pages
Company: Harry N. Abrams  (2003-11-12)
ISBN: 0810991144
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Steve Martin is one of America's treasured comedic actors, having appeared in some of the most popular movies of our time. He is also an accomplished screenwriter who has for the past few years turned his attention to writing plays. The results, collected here, demonstrate new facets of the range and talent he possesses on screen. His plays hilariously explore very serious questions about love and happiness and the meaning of life; they are rich with equal parts pain and slapstick humor, torment and wit. Picasso at the Lapin Agile, Steve Martin's first full-length play, opened at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater before moving on to Los Angeles (where it was the longest-running show in the history of the Westwood Playhouse) and, finally, to New York. An imagined meeting of Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein in 1904 - when both men were in their twenties - it is a compelling examination of science and art and their impact on a rapidly changing society. As the two men engage in a battle of ideas about probability, lust, artistic integrity, and the future, the play moves with ease between the breezy and the profound. Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays contains three one-acts, first presented together at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York. WASP depicts an archetypal middle-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestant family trying to live up to the routine of an idealized fifties suburbia. It is a dark and surreal comedy - a broad satire punctuated with insightful and poetic moments of irony. A meditation on the nature of love and loneliness, The Zig-Zag Woman concerns a woman so desperate to find affection that, with the help of a magic trick, she appears to divide her body into threeparts. In the final play, Patter for the Floating Lady, a magician plans to levitate his assistant in order to give her what he could not give her when they were together: freedom.

Author: Steve Martin
Paperback:  160 pages
Company: Grove Press  (1997-08-07)
ISBN: 0802135234
List Price: $13.00
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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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drawings from many periods, styles show master 20th-century draughtsman?s incredible line. 1905 circus family, portraits of Diaghilev, Balzac, cubist studies, neo-classical nudes, mythological scenes, many media: lithograph, drypoint, etching, pen-and-ink.


Author: Pablo Picasso
Paperback:  48 pages
Company: Dover Publications  (1982-01-01)
ISBN: 0486241963
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New board books in the best-selling Mini Masters series feature beautiful paintings from Cassatt and Picasso and rhyming text introducing budding artists to these famous masters.

Author: Julie Merberg, Suzanne Bober
Board book:  22 pages
Company: Chronicle Books  (2006-08-17)
ISBN: 0811855058
List Price: $6.95
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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:  560 pages
Company: Knopf  (2007-10-16) (2007-10-16)
ISBN: 037571149X
List Price: $30.00
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