This publication explores Pablo Picasso’s use of a black-and-white palette throughout his entire career.

Picasso Black and White examines the artist’s lifelong exploration of a black-and-white leitmotif through paintings and a selection of sculptures and works on paper. Picasso continued the tradition of engaging the color black that had been employed throughout a centuries-long history of Spanish painting by fellow artists José de Ribera, Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Zurbarán, and Francisco de Goya. Moreover, he made highly effective use of isolated black, white, and gray hues in a nod to monochromatic grisaille painting and to drawing, line, and form. As this volume attests, the recurrent motif of black and white appears throughout Picasso’s oeuvre, including his blue and rose periods, his investigations into Cubism and Surrealism, his interpretations of historical subject studies for his celebrated painting "Guernica", World War II, and an homage to old masters, as well as the powerful paintings of his last years. Featuring reproductions of more than 150 works, this book examines the extraordinary complexity and power of these expressive artworks, which purge color in order to highlight their formal structure. Including essays by leading Picasso scholars, this book is a unique and coherent perspective on one of the world’s most innovative and influential artists.

A groundbreaking study of Pablo Picasso, it documents all Picasso's major works from 1917 to 1937 including La Suite Voillard from the National Gallery of Canada. The title intends to be a metaphor. Harlequin can be anything you wish, a chameleon who constantly changes look and is never where we expect to find him, and Picasso, who could contemporaneously adopt the styles of cubism, neoclassicism, surrealism and expressionism, had many things in common with this legendary theatre character. Defined by some as a cannibal, a ruthless monster who devoured whatever he came across, Picasso was surprisingly all-inclusive. As a consequence he was, for a long time, an inevitable point of reference for many younger artists.

Настоящее дополненное и переработанное издание монографии "Пикассо. Монография.1881-1973", содержит более 1200 репродукций, отражающих все периоды творчества художника.

Кристин Пио описывает удивительно плодотворный период  с 1917 по 1952 год.
Мари-Лаура Бернадак повествует о неудержимой энергии, наполнявшей художника в последние годы жизни, с 1953 по 1973 год.
В книге увлекательно переплетается биографические подробности с искусствоведческими нюансами, при этом авторы строго придерживаются темы, и упоминания о современниках Пикассо, и событиях внешнего мира, сведены к необходимому минимуму.

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Nearly a decade after its initial publication, Picasso: The Monograph 1881-1973 is back in print, updated and redesigned in a more user-friendly format. Poligrafa's brand new edition of this classic volume offers more than 1,200 newly scanned reproductions, spanning Picasso's entire career and illustrating his breathtaking range of artistic expression, including paintings, drawings, lithographs, ceramics and sculpture. Elegantly translated from the original French, the monograph weaves biographical details with thorough elucidations of the artist's work into a concise and seamless narrative. All three contributors are highly regarded in Picasso scholarship: Brigitte Leal and Marie-Laure Bernadac, both former curators of the Musee Picasso in Paris, are now respectively curators of the Centre Pompidou and the Louvre Museum, while Christine Piot co-authored the catalogue raisonne of Picasso's sculpture. Leal covers Picasso's formative years through 1916, including his co-invention of Cubism with Georges Braque. Piot focuses on the artist's glory years from 1917 through 1952, and Bernadac discusses the vigor of Picasso's later years, from 1953 until his death in 1973. With clearly organized visual sources, acknowledgements of leading art historians' interpretations and quotes from Picasso's contemporaries, this book remains unsurpassed as the definitive Picasso monograph for students and art lovers alike.

Art critic and scholar Philippe Dagen approaches Picasso as a subject through a series of questions. What does it mean to be an artist in the twentieth century? What does it mean to be an artist in the time of newspapers and museums, in a time when the art market has expanded to reach the entire western world? Is modern civilization so different that it gives an artist a new attitude and causes him to redefine his role for the public, the market, and, therefore, to invent entirely new artistic practices?

Picasso is considered here in view of this last, and most probable, hypothesis. He is a product of his situation and time, in the broadest sense of the term. Refusing to confine himself to his studio or the small artistic community in Paris, Picasso responded forcefully to world affairs, giving pictorial and sculptural form to the passions and events he witnessed around him. This is a thoroughly modern Picasso, constantly and consciously confronting the modernity of the world.

Dagen's original exploration of his techniques, materials, and images shows how the artist both allowed modernity to infiltrate his work and at the same time to react against it. Picasso moved between acceptance and rejection, a perpetual confrontation that is, perhaps, the most satisfying explanation of his will to create change that drove him to leave the most varied and diverse body of work in the entire history of art.

About the Author:

Philippe Dagen is an art historian, professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, critic for the newspaper Le Monde, curator, and novelist. He has published and contributed to numerous titles on art history, including George Grosz: Berlin-New York, Otto Dix: The War, and Bettina Rheims: Can You Find Happiness.

"I wanted to be a painter, and I became Picasso," declared Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) in an apt survey of a triumphant career.

He had good grounds for the confidence palpable in his statement, for in the history of 20th century art, his name stands out over all the others. In Picasso`s paintings, drawings, lithographs, ceramics, and sculptures, he was tirelessly inventive and innovative, exhibiting an aesthetic bravado that kept him one step ahead of his contemporaries. From subject matter to new forms and techniques to new media, Picasso got there first. The Spanish artist's enormous output, from the eight-year-old's beginnings to the late work of a man of ninety-one, is surely one of the most diverse and creatively energetic in the whole history of art, and it is no exaggeration to see him as the genius of the century.

Carsten-Peter Warncke's study is a thorough review of Picasso's entire oeuvre, from the early Blue and Rose Periods, through the analytic and synthetic cubism and classicist phase all the way up to the art of the old savage Picasso.

A profound reassessment of Picasso’s dynamic later work, which shows the greatest painter of the twentieth century in a race with the time remaining to him.

No other painter has had such a more lasting influence on twentieth-century art than Pablo Picasso. Among the many phases and styles found in his oeuvre, his late period has a special position. His late paintings, featuring close-ups of the kiss and copulation, cling with all their might to sensuality and the embrace; they are marked by a great restlessness whose aim is to exorcise death itself. The “wild” paintings rapidly executed by his masterly hand are contrasts to his detailed, carefully executed drawings, which are dominated by a unique joy in narrative.

This volume, edited by Werner Spies, former director of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the most important Picasso expert of our day, examines almost two hundred works—paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures - shedding light on the special work methods and dialectics in Picasso’s later work. In particular, the exciting dialogue between painting and drawing, developed during his years in Mougins, shows that the greatest artist of the twentieth century was engaged in a race against time.

Книга об испанском живописце, рисовальщике, гравере, скульпторе, керамисте, писателе Пабло Пикассо (1881–1973). Это, несомненно, наиболее многосторонний и самый гениальный художник ХХ века. Его талант проявился очень рано. Широко известны его работы «Девочка на шаре», «Авиньонские девицы», Амбруаз Воллар» и другие. Он пробовал свои силы во всех видах художественного творчества, умел приспосабливаться к новейшим течениям в искусстве, равно как и предвосхищать и создавать их или оказывать на них влияние. Благодаря своей независимости и универсальности, Пикассо стал первопроходцем современного искусства. Эта способность работать одновременно в разных во многом противоположных стилях есть проявление гениальности художника. Издание состоит из десяти глав, рассказывающих о жизни художника и об истории создания каждой картины, представленной в издании. В конце книги приводится хронология жизни и творчества мастера, проиллюстрированная документальными фотографиями, а также библиография избранных трудов о Пикассо

"I wanted to be a painter, and I became Picasso," declared Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) in an apt survey of a triumphant career. He had good grounds for the confidence palpable in his statement, for in the history of 20th-century art, his name stands out over all the others. In Picasso`s paintings, drawings, lithographs, ceramics, and sculptures, he was tirelessly inventive and innovative, exhibiting an aesthetic bravado that kept him one step ahead of his contemporaries. From subject matter to new forms and techniques to new media, Picasso got there first. The Spanish artist's enormous output, from the eight-year-old beginnings to the late work of a man of ninety-one, is surely one of the most diverse and creatively energetic in the whole history of art, and it is no exaggeration to see him as the genius of the century. Carsten-Peter Warncke's study is a thorough review of Picasso's entire oeuvre, from the early Blue and Rose Periods, through the analytic and synthetic cubism and classicist phase all the way up to the art of the old savage Picasso.

Our study of Picasso, the most exhaustive record of his work to date, contains almost 1500 illustrations - from his earliest drawings to the master's very last painting.