Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) developed the monumental, mysterious painting Boy Leading a Horse (1905–6) from an unrealized mural during a pivotal period of evolution in his art. He was emerging from his "Blue Period" and his "Rose Period," but not yet at work on the groundbreaking Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Through vigorous brushstrokes and a stark palette of gray and ochre, Picasso invokes an impressive set of past and present artworks in his rendering of the two figures in Boy Leading a Horse. The scene is detached from time and place, and the striding boy and his horse project a steely firmness of mind, body and purpose—yet the purpose is unknown. In this volume of the One on One series, Annemarie Iker offers a close examination of this composition, produced during a phase of private introspection and art historical investigation at the start of the 20th century. This is the second volume of the series to be dedicated to a work by Picasso in MoMA's collection, and illustrates a transitional moment in his oeuvre as fascinating as his more defined eras.

A painter, draftsman and sculptor, but also a photographer, engraver, set designer and ceramist, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) excelled in every genre. He was one of the most prolific and polymorphic artists, and a poet who was passionate about Greek and Latin literature. Throughout his career, he illustrated countless books by poets such as Apollinaire, Jacob and Reverdy. In 1930 he illustrated the Metamorphoses by Ovid, a series of engravings that, with the great frescoes by painter and architect Giulio Romano (1499–1546), is the perfect echo of Romano’s Palazzo Te, a palace in the suburbs of Mantua, Italy, itself a magnificent example of the Mannerist style of architecture. The superb catalog Picasso a Palazzo Te: Poetry and Salvation displays the close relationship that links the artistic practice of Picasso and poetry, revealing a little-known aspect of his work.

This book presents an innovative new reading of Picasso’s long artistic career. Instead of dividing his art into discrete stylistic periods, authoritative texts and lavish illustrations demonstrate the unity of his work by showing Picasso’s art as a dynamic whole united by his exploration of both his past art and invention of new artistic conceptions. As Picasso said, “my art must not be considered as an evolution,” but rather a constantly shifting exchange of retrospection and innovation.
Selected from the collection of the Museo Picasso Málaga and the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte (FABA), more than 150 paintings, sculptures, drawings and engravings explore the creative pathways of his art. Extensive photographs of the installation demonstrate the unity of his art through unexpected juxtapositions of works from different decades. More than 30 essays explore the meaning of major individual works. Five “focus” chapters address specialized facets of his practice, including his responses to African sculpture, World War II and the commission to create a huge mural for UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) was one of the most renowned and protean artists of the 20th century, creating everything from paintings to ceramics and set designs. He is known for his mercurial shifts in style, characterized by titled periods, as well as his propagation of new techniques including collage. There are several museums and collections worldwide dedicated entirely to his work.

The publication of this engaging collection of Picasso’s sketchbooks marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). Bringing together 14 sketchbooks dating between 1900 and 1959, this cache of archival material encompasses nearly every period of Picasso’s career and connects his most well-known bodies of work. The 2023 exhibition 14 Sketchbooks built upon the 1986 Pace Gallery exhibition Je Suis le Cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso, which was the first dedicated showing of his sketchbooks.
This sketchbook-like volume features reproductions from the 14 books that trace the evolution of Picasso’s observations and ideas across his distinctive stylistic periods. All sketchbooks are contextualized by curatorial advisors and Picasso experts Marilyn McCully and Michael Raeburn. Blank pages at the back of the publication invite the reader to contribute their own sketches and ideas.

While there has been considerable interest in the later work of Pablo Picasso over the past several decades, there remains much to discover regarding his prodigious printmaking activities, specifically on the role played by the progressive proof. There has been an uptick in research and acquisition of these sets of proofs by museums and private collectors over the past 20 years, but exhibitions and publications have lagged behind.
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), one of the towering creative figures of the 20th century, Picasso and the Progressive Proof: Linocut Prints from a Private Collection explores in depth an aspect of the artist’s late graphic output: the linoleum block or linocut. Published prints and their related proofs drawn from a notable private collection are examined in the context of themes Picasso developed over his entire career: the Spanish-born artist’s love of the corrida or bullfight; his interest in Antiquity; and above all, his competition with the Old Masters.

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) was committed to depicting landscapes throughout his entire life. From his earliest days in art school until the year before his death, landscape remained the prime genre through which he mediated his perception of the world and which shaped his own creative evolution. Yet within Picasso’s vast oeuvre, landscapes have received the least scholarly attention. Landscape would serve as a catalyst for his formal experimentation, including early Cubism; as a field in which to investigate urban modernity; as an interface between humanity and nature; as a ground for direct sculptural intervention; as a space of personal withdrawal; as an inviting terrain for elegiac scenes; and as a territory of resistance and flight.
Landscapes offer the clearest lens for understanding Picasso’s attentiveness to his cultural milieu as well as to his ongoing engagement with art-historical traditions. Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds celebrates the depth of his exploration of landscape subjects along with his expansive approach to this traditional genre.

This book, first published in 2019 and featuring around 80 works, is devoted to the paintings and sculptures of the young Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) from the so-called Blue and Rose periods, between 1901 and 1907. The masterpieces of these crucial years, every one of them a milestone on Picasso’s path to preeminence as the 20th century’s most famous artist, are presented together in an unparalleled concentration and quality. Picasso’s pictures from this phase are some of the finest and most emotionally compelling examples of modern painting and are counted among the most valuable works in the entire history of art.
Throughout the Blue period, Picasso depicted the material deprivation and psychological suffering of people on the margins of society, before turning in 1905 (when he had settled in Paris) to the themes of the Rose period: jugglers, acrobats and harlequins. His increasing deformation and fragmentation of the figure throughout this period heralded the emergence of the new pictorial language of Cubism.
The works of the Blue and Rose periods have a universal appeal and poignancy. Existential themes?life, love, sexuality, fate and death?find embodiment in the delicate beauty of young female and male figures, and in depictions of children and of old people scarred by life.

In the summer of 1921, on the west wall of his improvised garage studio in Fontainebleau, France, Pablo Picasso painted two large-scale and astonishingly different-looking pictures side by side. On the left hung his classicizing Three Women at the Spring, long associated with the "return to order" in the aftermath of World War I. To its right, Picasso worked on one of two versions of Three Musicians, often described as the culmination of his prewar Cubist style. The visual dissonance of this pairing still has the ability to shock. Yet, a close look at Picasso’s handling of materials, studio installations and fluid understanding of style reveals that these two seemingly incompatible works have more in common than meets the eye, as do other monumental works on canvas, small paintings, line drawings, etchings and pastels that he created in Fontainebleau during his brief three-month residency.
Published to accompany an exhibition that reunites Three Women at the Spring and Three Musicians with the richly varied body of work that emerged from Picasso’s Fontainebleau stay, this copiously illustrated catalog, including never-before-seen photographs and archival documents, offers an introduction by curator Anne Umland and 15 object-based essays coauthored by art historians and conservators.

Representations of the body form the cornerstone of this major publication focusing on Picasso’s sculpture, published for the first Spanish exhibition on this theme, at the Museo Picasso in Málaga and the Guggenheim Bilbao. Assembled by Carmen Giménez, the Museo Picasso Málaga’s first director, it includes a careful selection of sculptures that illustrates the tremendous plurality of styles in which Picasso explored and expanded forms of three-dimensional representation of the human body.
Picasso used all the materials at his disposal in his sculptures—wood, bronze, iron, cement, steel and plaster—a fact that expresses the primacy of the medium for him. The human body likewise proved an enduring source of fascination and creative reinvention for the artist, and his sculptural work ingeniously balances deformation and sensuality across the span of his prodigious career.

Spanning the full career of Picasso (1881–1973), from his first cut drawings made in 1899 at nine years of age through to the 1960s with works he made in his eighties, Picasso Cut Papers features some of the artist’s most whimsical and intriguing works made on paper and in paper, alongside a select group of sculptures in metal, wood and ceramic. Although Picasso rarely sold or exhibited his cut papers (or papiers découpés) during his lifetime, he signed, dated and archived them just as he did all his works. They were simply part of a more private studio practice, often made for family or as models for his fabricators.
The first publication to focus solely on Picasso’s cut papers, this book features many works reproduced for the first time with newly commissioned photography, alongside new scholarship on a little-known aspect of one of the 20th century’s most pivotal practices, which contribute to the ongoing discourse surrounding innovation and abstraction at the roots of modern art. Also featured is a photo section that surveys Picasso’s engagement with cut paper and sculpture over the decades and documents his practice of cutting paper, both in and out of the studio.

This book documents an immersive show featuring over 200 of Pablo Picasso’s paintings, removed from their frames and projected onto huge origamilike forms in cavernous exhibition spaces. Accompanied by critical texts, the installation shots offer a rare and fresh perspective on this late genius of modern art.

Although he spent most of his adult life in France, painter Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) never denied the artistic influence that his upbringing in Spain imparted upon him. Of particular significance was the art and culture of the Iberian Peninsula where he had been born and later lived as a young man, though it was likely that his first real encounter with Iberian art took place at the Louvre in France.
This volume accompanies a curatorial collaboration between the Centro Botín in Spain and the Musée Picasso-Paris in France that explores Picasso’s relationship with Iberian art on an unprecedented scale. The book demonstrates this rich connection by comparing works by Picasso with masterpieces from the Louvre’s Iberian collection and major Spanish archaeological museums. Further context provided by the world’s leading experts in Iberian art conveys the depth of Picasso’s cultural and artistic dialogue with his birthplace.

How does any given body of work wind up in major collections, museums and exhibitions? Very often, it is because of the unsung efforts of individuals who advocate for the work in the face of conservatism and criticism. In Picasso’s case, this role in Germany fell to the Bremen art dealer Michael Hertz. It was Hertz’s commitment in the postwar period that resulted in the widespread acquisition of the artist by museums after World War II. In particular, Hertz’s work on behalf of Picasso greatly benefited Kunsthalle Bremen, which has one of the most extensive collections of the artist’s prints.

The Picasso Connection brings together outstanding printworks by Picasso, ranging from lithographs and linocuts to book illustrations. Picasso’s print oeuvre, as represented here, exemplifies the triumph of the affordable medium in postwar Germany, as well as Hertz’s strong commitment.

This lavishly illustrated volume reexamines Pablo Picasso’s famous Blue Period (1901–04) in paintings, works on paper and sculpture. Relying on new information gleaned from technical studies performed on The Blue Room (Le Tub) (1901), Crouching Beggarwoman (La Miséreuse accroupie) (1902) and The Soup (La Soupe) (1903), this multidisciplinary volume combines art history and advanced conservation science in order to show how the young Picasso fashioned a distinct style and a pronounced artistic identity as he adapted the artistic lessons of fin-de-siècle Paris to the social and political climate of an economically struggling Barcelona.

Essays, a chronology and a summary of conservation findings contextualize Picasso’s experimental approach to painting during the Blue Period. A major contribution to the burgeoning field of technical art history, Picasso: Painting the Blue Period advances new scholarship on one of the most critical episodes in 20th-century modernism.

Over a 25-year span, from 1946 to 1971, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) produced a ceramic oeuvre that has slowly become an immensely popular dimension of his vast output. Working at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris, he created thousands of unique works that reflect the abiding importance of this medium for him.

This book selects 50 ceramic pieces from the Musée national Picasso-Paris, which represents almost the half of the celebrated ceramic collection of the museum, along with a selection of pieces from the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza, Italy, which provided direct sources of inspiration for the artist. These include pieces in the classical black-figure and red-figure ceramic style; bucchero vases from Etruria; Spanish and Italian popular pottery; incised pottery from the Italian Quattrocento; specimens of Mediterranean ceramics painted with animals; and Mesoamerican ceramic vessels.

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) was one of the most innovative, experimental, prolific, influential and controversial painters of the 20th century. Part of Polígrafa's Modern Masters series, this affordable monograph follows Picasso throughout his career, a career that spanned nearly eight decades and produced more than 100,000 works.

Picasso selects more than 60 of the artist's most representative works that follow the artist from his poetic images of the impoverished and circus performers, from his beloved blue and rose periods to his revolutionary cubist period depicting the confusion of modern life, and beyond.

In addition to a brief introduction, this volume contains analysis of the artist's morphing stylistic characteristics over the decades and individual commentary on each of the works reproduced.

Picasso’s artistic output is astonishing in its ambition and variety. Picasso and Paper examines a particular aspect of his legendary capacity for invention: his imaginative and original use of paper. He used it as a support for autonomous works, including etchings, prints and drawings, as well as for his papier-collé experiments of the 1910s and his revolutionary three-dimensional “constructions,” made of cardboard, paper and string.

Sometimes his use of paper was simply determined by circumstance: in occupied Paris, where art supplies were in short supply, he ripped up paper tablecloths to make works of art. And of course his works on paper comprise the preparatory stages of some of his very greatest paintings.

With reproductions of nearly 400 works of art and a series of insightful new texts by leading authorities on the artist, this sumptuous study reveals the myriad ways in which Picasso explored the potential of paper at different stages of his career. Picasso and Paper is published for an exhibition organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Cleveland Museum of Art in partnership with the Musée national Picasso-Paris.

The legendary life and career of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) spanned nearly the entire 20th century and ushered in some of its most significant artistic revolutions.

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) always maintained a very particular relationship with his own depiction in photography, and with the photographers in his milieu, and possessed an intuitive grasp of how to use his image as an icon.

This elegant volume includes photographs of Picasso's life, work and studios by Cecil Beaton, Arnold Newman, Brassaï, David Douglas Duncan, André Villers and Robert Doisneau, as well as Dora Maar's famous pictures of the various states of Picasso's Guernica.

Picasso: The Photographer's Gaze immerses the reader in the universe of Picasso and brings together images that explore a creator who is simultaneously the author, model, witness and viewer of his own work and life. This photographic stroll from one studio to the next shows the multidisciplinary richness of his work, where experimentation is the priority.

Published for the most ambitious exhibition ever staged by the Fondation Beyeler, this book is devoted to the paintings and sculptures of the young Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) from the so-called Blue and Rose periods, between 1901 and 1906. The masterpieces of these crucial years, every one of them a milestone on Picasso's path to preeminence as the 20th century's most famous artist, are presented together, in an unparalleled concentration and quality. Picasso's pictures from this phase are some of the finest and most emotionally compelling examples of modern painting, and are counted among the most valuable works in the entire history of art.
Throughout the Blue period, Picasso depicted the material deprivation and psychological suffering of people on the margins of society, before turning, in 1905 (when he had settled in Paris), to the themes of the Rose period: jugglers, acrobats and harlequins. In the summer of 1906, Picasso spent several weeks in the Spanish Pyrenees, where he produced a profusion of paintings and sculptures uniting classical and archaic ideals of the body. His increasing deformation and fragmentation of the figure throughout this period—apparent in the "primitivist" pictures, especially the female nudes—heralded the emergence of the new pictorial language of cubism.
The works of the Blue and Rose periods have a universal appeal and poignancy. Existential themes—life, love, sexuality, fate and death—find embodiment in the delicate beauty of young female and male figures, and in depictions of children and of old people scarred by life, whose rendering by Picasso shows happiness and joy, but also loneliness and melancholy.

Food frequently surfaces as a motif in the art of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), and Picasso's Kitchen presents the many forms that the culinary takes in his work. Adopting as its guiding principle the conceit that "cooking is a subtle revelation of Picasso's art," this handsomely designed volume, with its card-stock cover bearing a tipped-on portrait of the artist, reproduces works alongside photographs of the artist working in his grand studio and the friends and lovers with whom he surrounded himself.

Some of the book's sections examine individual artworks such as Picasso's interpretation of Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe or his playful ceramic works, while other sections visit the bohemian cafes and restaurants of Paris and Barcelona where Picasso and other avant-garde artists of the period ate and drank, through menus, photographs, prints and paintings, searching for how these places slipped into the artists' work in ways both overt and subtle. Another section draws on archival material from Picasso's writings on food.

Perfect for the cook, art lover or both, this book vividly conveys how this theme greatly enhances our enjoyment and understanding of Picasso's oeuvre.

In 1946, Pablo Picasso visited an exhibition of ceramics in Vallauris, an area in southeastern France known for its many potteries. He would move to the region soon after, establishing a steady relationship with the Madoura ceramics workshop in 1948.

It was a watershed moment for Picasso, who throughout his long life was always on the lookout for new artistic challenges in all conceivable materials. Picasso's experiments with various ceramic materials, oxides and glazes would produce a huge body of work: some 4,000 ceramic objects bearing the motifs of animals, fauns and women evoked through Picasso's whimsical, elegant handling of shape and line. This major body of work in ceramics forms a lesser-known but highly original part of the oeuvre of an artist who was constantly reinventing himself and his forms.

This book presents more than 150 of Picasso's most important ceramic works reproduced in beautiful four-color printing, as well as new texts about the artist's pieces in this medium. The book also contains a detailed glossary of ceramic terms and a review of the forms most commonly used by Picasso. The only book in print on this beautiful and highly imaginative part of Picasso's oeuvre, Picasso: Ceramics is an essential volume.

One hundred years on, this book portrays Picasso’s legendary 1917 journey to Rome and Naples with Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky and the company of Sergei Diagilhev’s Ballet Russes. lt was during this trip that he met and fell in love with the company’s leading dancer, Olga Khokhlova, who would become his first wife. In addition to the extraordinary weeks spent in ltaly, which were pivotal for the development of Picasso’s art during the postwar years, the monograph also examines his production immediately after, with particular reference to the ballets Parade and Pulcinella, as well as those paintings indebted to the iconographic and cultural worlds to which these ballets introduced him.

The book focuses on Picasso’s ability to experiment in different genres, from still-life to portraiture, from the playful and decorative collages executed during World War I, to the sophisticated realism of the years of his association with Diagilhev. It also documents the long-term impact of the ltalian journey on Picasso’s art.

With over 100 works, including iconic paintings, drawings and photographs, Between Cubism and Neoclassicism shows masterpieces and key works of this period, illuminating the classical elements throughout the artist’s career.

1917: Picasso in Barcelona celebrates the last significant period Picasso (1881–1973) spent in the city of Barcelona. Since the artist had settled in Paris in 1904, he had not spent much time in the city. But in 1917, having designed the sets and costumes for Parade, Picasso followed Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to Barcelona and remained there from June to November.

Picasso’s arrival in Barcelona in 1917 coincided with an artistic boom in the city, energized by the Exhibition of French Art at the Palau de Belles Arts and the cultural activity generated by local galleries. The presence of Picasso in the city was lauded in artistic circles, and the daily press published many articles about him.

This Barcelona period was one of stylistic transition for Picasso, with the artist alternating between Cubism and a more classical, realistic line of work. Though these paintings played a crucial role in helping Picasso navigate his changing style, when his time in Barcelona was coming to an end, he chose to leave them in the city—where they remain to this day in the collection of the city’s Museu Picasso.

This book, published to accompany the 100th anniversary of Picasso’s stay, features paintings, preparatory drawings for the paintings and independent drawings along with related documentation, presenting the fullness of the artist’s production during his months spent in Barcelona.

From the beginning of his career until its end, Pablo Picasso’s prime subject was the human figure, and portraiture remained a favorite genre for the artist. Picasso’s portraiture reflected the full range of his innovative styles--Symbolist, Cubist, Neoclassical, Surrealist, Expressionist. Depicting people in his intimate circle rather than working to commission enabled Picasso to take an expressive, radically experimental approach to making portraits.

However extreme his departure from representational conventions, Picasso never wholly abandoned drawing from the sitter or ceased producing portraits of classic beauty and naturalism. He remained in constant dialogue with the art of the past, and his portraits often alluded to canonical masterpieces. Treating favorite Old Masters as indecorously as his intimate friends, he created suites of free “variations” after Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” and Rembrandt’s “The Prodigal Son.”

These dizzying stylistic shifts of Picasso’s long career can be traced through their manifestations in his portraits. Picasso Portraits tells this story thematically, with a focus on Picasso’s creative process rather than his biography. Issues addressed in depth in this volume include Picasso’s exploitation of familiar poses and formats, his sources of inspiration among the Old Masters and the relationship between observation, memory and fantasy.

The legendary life and career of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) spanned nearly the entire 20th century and ushered in some of its most significant artistic revolutions. Hard to overestimate in importance or originality, Picasso’s style is perhaps best captured in the words of his friend Paul Éluard: “Picasso paints like God or the devil.”

Elizabeth Cowling is Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. Her publications include Picasso: Style and Meaning (2002) and Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose (2006). She has co-curated several exhibitions, including Picasso Sculptor/Painter (1994), Matisse Picasso (2002), and Picasso Looks at Degas (2010).

Ann Temkin is The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Anne Umland is The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA.

Luise Mahler is Assistant Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Virginie Perdrisot is Curator of Sculpture and Ceramics at the Musée national Picasso, Paris.

Cahiers d'Art is proud to present a special issue of the Cahiers d'Art revue entitled 'Picasso: In the Studio' giving a close look at Picasso in the studio as you have never seen him, featuring rare and previously unpublished photographs illustrating the artist in his studio and the work itself in progress. Through this rich and detailed exploration of the artists practice, the issue highlights both the creative process and artist’s gesture.

Cécile Godefroy and Vérane Tasseau are guest editors for the issue. It is comprised of seven chapters, each devoted to a particular technique examined through rare photographs of the artist in his studios alongside texts by noted historians such as Elizabeth Cowling, Cécile Godefroy, Ann Hindry, Brigitte Leal, Marilyn McCully and Vérane Tasseau.

Each chapter is followed by an interview with contemporary artists such as Miquel Barceló, George Condo, Sheila Hicks, William Kentridge, Jeff Koons, Robert Longo, and Tatiana Trouvé who have been invited to comment on the related technique in Picasso’s work, and in their own work as well as on their relationship to the artist.

In 1946, when Picasso received the offer to use one of the great rooms in the castle at Antibes as a studio, he exclaimed enthusiastically: “I'm not only going to paint, I'll decorate the museum too.” The result was a series of paintings and drawings that reflected the jubilant spirit, the joie de vivre, of a country that was free once more. Picasso later added sculptures, graphic works, and ceramics to this collection, forming the basis for what would be France's first museum dedicated to him, inaugurated in 1966 as Musée Picasso, Antibes.This catalog, published in conjunction with the exhibition of Palazzo Grassi, comprises a great selection of the most outstanding works from the Musée Picasso of Antibes, a large number of which have never been shown beyond the museum's walls. These include the murals La Joie de Vivre, 1946, The Sea Urchin Eater, 1946, and the impressive sculpture Head of Woman with Chignon, 1932. Featuring paintings, drawings, sculptures, and ceramics, the works illustrate a splendid period in Picasso's artistic career. The volume also includes a selection of photographs of Picasso by Polish artist Michel Sima, which portray the context in which Picasso created the works.

Jean-Louis Andral is Chief Curator of the Musée Picasso of Antibes. Pierre Daix is a novelist, essayist, and art historian. Daix knew Picasso well for a quarter century and has written extensively on the artist. He was awarded the Georges Pompidou Prize in 2003 for his book Picasso: Life and Art.