"Picasso. Una biografía" de John Richardson explora la vida del artista a través de su amistad con él, diarios personales y acceso a su estudio. Este primer volumen, con más de 700 fotos, abarca su juventud en España y su formación en París, así como sus relaciones con figuras clave del arte. Una obra fundamental.
A book designed specifically for young adults studying PSHE, but with the needs of the teacher very much in mind.
Published by the Clark Art on the occasion of the exhibition Picasso ] Encounters, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, June 4-August 27, 2017.
An exploration of the lives and work of Picasso's muses from the whole of their lives. It is a widely held view that Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) entered a renewed creative period alongside each new muse in his life. But this volume does not discuss Picasso's biography or stylistic phases; rather, it pays tribute to the women who left their mark on his life. Picasso: The Women in His Life explores these women's entire lives and creative work, not just the years they spent at the famous artist's side. Müller and Bernard sketch the lives of ten women, including Picasso's mother--with whom he was very close, and whose maiden name he chose as his professional name--his wives, and his many lovers. When he wanted to marry the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, she warned him that he would remain married to painting throughout his life. They separated in 1935 because of his young muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was soon deposed by Dora Maar. Following various separations, these women disappeared from Picasso's canvases, but they did not vanish entirely. This book pays tribute to them all.
"My work is like a diary," Picasso once told John Richardson. "To understand it, you have to see how it mirrors my life." Richardson, who lived near the artist in Provence for ten years and became a trusted friend, was able to observe and record this phenomenon at first hand. Later, Picasso's widow continued to give Richardson access to the artist's studios and storerooms. This close personal friendship and the privilege of working in hitherto inaccessible archives make Richardson uniquely qualified to write the artist's life, rescuing his renown from sensationalist legend and specialist pleading and analyzing anew the traumas and obsessions that triggered his explosive genius. Richardson is the first biographer to make sense of the myriad contradictions that leave so many statements about Picasso's nature equally true in reverse. The artist's ambivalence is one of the author's central themes. At last we are able to see how his courage and terror misogyny and tenderness, generosity and thrift, superstition and skepticism, cynicism and sentiment, are reflected in the conflicts and paradoxes in his work. Richardson's eye is finely attuned to the complexities of Picasso's art, and his extensive knowledge of cultural history enables him to show how Picasso plundered the art of the past, the imaginations of his poet friends, the beliefs of mystics and magi, to create a revolutionary new synthesis. The author's evocation of Picasso's ferocious ego, demonic loves and hates and black fears is the more absorbing for its terse and lively prose and freedom from jargon. This first volume of Richardson's prodigiously detailed and documented four-volume study takes Picasso to the age of twenty-five. It reveals how the adolescent Picasso struggled, through determination and study, to escape the shadow of his father's artistic failures. It describes his precocious success in Barcelona and Paris and the period of rejection and despair that followed. We watch Picasso transform the prostitutes of the Saint-Lazare prison into Blue period madonnas and, later, the performers of the Montmartre circuses into Rose period harlequins. Volume I culminates in Picasso's dawning perception of himself as the messiah of the modern movement. Some nine hundred illustrations, many of them unfamiliar, enable the reader to follow Picasso's mesmerizing development in images as well as words.