Pablo Picasso – författare

Demonstrating the artist's major themes, techniques, and styles, 44 drawings — dating from 1905 to 1954 — perfectly capture the master draughtsman's incredible line: 1905 circus family, portraits of Diaghilev and Balzac, cubist studies, neo-classical nudes, and mythological scenes. Media include lithograph, drypoint, etching, and pen-and-ink.

Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Few can be said to have had as broad an impact on European art in the twentieth century as these two cultural giants. Pablo Picasso, a pioneering visual artist, created a prolific and widely influential body of work. Gertrude Stein, an intellectual tastemaker, hosted the leading salon for artists and writers between the wars in her Paris apartment, welcoming Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound to weekly events at her home to discuss art and literature. It comes as no surprise, then, that Picasso and Stein were fast friends and frequent confidantes. Through Picasso and Stein’s casual notes and reflective letters, this volume of correspondence between the two captures Paris both in the golden age of the early twentieth century and in one of its darkest hours, the Nazi occupation through mentions of dinner parties, lovers, work, and the crises of the two world wars. Illustrated with photographs and postcards, as well as drawings and paintings by Picasso, this collection captures an exhilarating period in European culture through the minds of two artistic greats.

Only edition in printIn the 1940s, Picasso wrote two plays in French: the first, Desire Caught by the Tail, was conceived during the German occupation of Paris and features a cast of grotesque allegorical characters such as the Onion, Silence or Fat Anxiety discussing the crucial wartime themes of hunger, cold and love; the second, The Four Little Girls, came about a few years after the end of the war on the French Riviera, and presents the stream-of-consciousness thoughts of four unnamed girls in a vegetable garden, revealing an unexpectedly evil aspect of childhood.These surreal compositions, which were meant to be read aloud rather than formally staged, are a testament to the great artist’s imaginative powers, and have been considered as forerunners to the theatre of the absurd of the 1950s, as exemplified by Beckett, Ionesco and Adamov.

Protean, erotic, scatological and experimental, Picasso's poetry is finally compiled in this essential anthologyPablo Picasso is arguably the most famous and influential artist of the 20th century. What few in the English-speaking world know is that in 1935, at age 54, an emotional crisis caused Picasso to halt all painting and devote himself entirely to poetry. Even after resuming his visual work, Picasso continued to write, in a characteristic torrent, until 1959, leaving a body of prose poems that André Breton praised as “an intimate journal, both of the feelings and the senses, such as has never been kept before.” Similarly struck by the poems' originality, Michel Leiris wrote, “If we must compare him, despite his fierce singularity, in order to try and situate him on the literary map, I see only James Joyce.” Near the end of his life, Picasso himself was quoted as having “told a friend that long after his death his writing would gain recognition and encyclopedias would say: 'Picasso, Pablo Ruiz—Spanish poet who dabbled in painting, drawing and sculpture.'“ For the past five years, poets Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris have overseen a project to translate the majority of this writing into English for the first time. Working from Picasso's original Spanish and French (he wrote in both languages), they enlisted the help of over a dozen contemporary poets in order to mark, as they note in their introduction, “Picasso's entry into our own time.” This is indeed a new Picasso for most of us, or rather, a renewed Picasso: the poems are as protean, erotic, scatological and experimental in form as his visual art has always been described. But amid the ubiquitous posters, t-shirts and tchotchkes, how many of us have truly felt the impact of Picasso's visual work as powerfully as it was perceived in the first half of the 20th century? The poems give us a 21st-century Picasso, free of cliché. Perhaps they will even spark a revival of interest in his “dabblings.”

Picasso’s Kitchen delves, for the first time, into the relationship between Picasso and cooking. Food and kitchenware are present in many of his still-lifes, such as the tomato plant in the Grands- Augustins studio, the eel stew that his wife Jacqueline used to cook, the main painting he made on Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe... Cuisine is also a recurring topic in his poetry, and many of his sculptures are based on kitchen utensils, such as his famous cubist absinthe glass. This publication addresses food and cuisine in Picasso’s work, but also the restaurants that marked his life—such as the famous Le Catalan, near his studio on Grands-Augustins Street, in which Picasso used to eat with his friends during German occupation—as well as the importance of restaurants as meeting points for the avant-garde, from Quatre Gats in Barcelona to Lapin Agile in Montmartre, Paris.

Pablo Picasso always maintained a complex and intense relationship with photography and with the photographers in his milieu, something that could be seen when he pretended to be a reporter one summer, when he used his image as an icon, or when he took inspired and playful self-portraits. This book, which is also the catalogue of the exhibition of the same name at the Museu Picasso of Barcelona, immerses the reader in the universe of Picasso through photography and brings together images that explore all the facets of a creator who is simultaneously the author, model, witness and viewer of his work and life.