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.

Paperback:  32 pages
Company: Grosset & Dunlap  (2002-12-30)
ISBN: 0448428628
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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: Laurence Anholt
Hardcover:  32 pages
Company: Barron's Educational Series  (1998-09-01)
ISBN: 0764150316
List Price: $14.95
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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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Presents a biography of Picasso

Author: Mike Venezia
Paperback:  32 pages
Company: Children's Press (CT)  (1988-09)
ISBN: 0516422715
List Price: $6.95
Amazon Price: $3.24
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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
List Price: $40.00
Amazon Price: $22.00
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Ever wonder what it would have been like if wild and crazy Steve Martin had written an episode of "The Twilight Zone"? Well, wonder no more. The zany actor/comedian made playwright rookie of the year with this, the script of his first comedy, set in a bar in 1904 Paris. Two of the regulars, twentysomethings Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein, argue about the art of physics and the physics of art as they try to impress and bed a pretty girl. And then the space/time/culture continuum ruptures, and they're joined by a figure from the future who seems to be . . . Elvis Presley! Read for yourself why the show's been done Off-Broadway and at regionals around the country.

Author: Steve Martin
Paperback:  160 pages
Company: Grove Press  (1997-08-07)
ISBN: 0802135234
List Price: $13.00
Amazon Price: $3.49
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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.

Author: Francoise Gilot
Paperback:  352 pages
Company: Anchor  (1989-06-26) (1989-05-26)
ISBN: 0385261861
List Price: $15.00
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When Pigasso met Mootisse, what begins as a neighborly overture escalates into a mess. Before you can say paint-by-numbers, the two artists become fierce rivals, calling each other names and ultimately building a fence between them. But when the two painters paint opposite sides of the fence that divides them, they unknowingly create a modern art masterpiece, and learn it is their friendship that is the true work of art.
Nina Laden's wacky illustrations complement this funny story that non only introduces children to two of the world's most extraordinary modern artists, but teaches a very important lesson‐how to creatively resolve a conflict—in a most unusual way.

Author: Nina Laden
Hardcover:  40 pages
Company: Chronicle Books  (1998-07-01)
ISBN: 0811811212
List Price: $16.95
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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
List Price: $30.00
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One spring morning in 1957, veteran photojournalist David Douglas Duncan paid a visit to his friend and frequent photographic subject Pablo Picasso, at the artists villa near Cannes. Traveling with Duncan was his pet dachshund, Lump. The photographers nomadic lifestyle and his other doga giant Afghan houndhad never suited the jealous and temperamental Lump. So when they arrived at Picassos Villa La Californie that spring day, Lump decided that he had found his paradise on earth, and that he would take up permanent residence with Picasso. Lump was soon immortalized in a Picasso portrait painted on a plate, but this was just the beginning. In a suite of 45 paintings reinterpreting Velsquezs masterpiece Las Meninas, Picasso replaced the impressive hound in the foreground with jaunty renderings of Lump. Fifteen of the paintings are reproduced here, 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
List Price: $24.95
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