A fresh perspective on the importance of Picasso's drawing practice and how he used his materials and graphic techniques to reinterpret past traditions and invigorate his art Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is acknowledged as one of the greatest draftsmen of the 20th century. Picasso's Drawings, 1890-1921 follows the dazzling development of his drawing practice from the precocious academic exercises of his youth to his renewal of classicism in his virtuoso output of the early 1920s. A selection of more than seventy works on paper, with extended entries, highlights his stylistic experiments and techniques during this roughly thirty-year period, which begins and ends in a classical mode and encompasses his most radical innovations. 
An essay by Susan Grace Galassi provides a detailed study of Picasso's drawing practice and explores his interest in the Old Masters, and Marilyn McCully considers the early critical responses to Picasso's drawings. These discussions of Picasso's style, sources, and techniques demonstrate how drawing served as an essential means of invention and discovery for the artist. This book brings to the fore Picasso's engagement with artists of the past and the ways in which he perpetuated, competed with, and ultimately reinvented the practices of his artistic mentors on his own terms. Through emulation, allusion, dissection, and outright hijacking, Picasso continued the grand tradition of drawing in a revitalized form. This study reveals the extent to which the artist relied on drawing as a means of synthesizing past and present, tradition and innovation, to give his own art a bold and vigorous expression.

Picasso's Drawings, 1890-1921: Reinventing Tradition

Arts & Photography

McCully, Marilyn

Galassi, Susan Grace

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

Although Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) is often thought of as a solitary genius, his career was fueled by the inspiration he drew from both personal and collegial relationships. Picasso practiced printmaking throughout his career—an interest that inherently fostered collaboration, as it brought him in contact with numerous printers and publishers. At the same time, his many famous muses—Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, and others—influenced both his techniques and his imagery. This book features thirty-five of Picasso’s most important prints that showcase the artistic exchange vital to his process. It includes his first major etching from 1904, portraits of his lovers and family members, and prints that transform motifs by Rembrandt, Manet, and other earlier artists, such as an interpretation of Rembrandt’s Ecce Homo from 1970. Picasso | Encounters considers the artist’s major statements in printmaking throughout his career.

Picasso | Encounters: Printmaking and Collaboration

Clarke, Jay A.

Clark Art Institute

Homage to Barcelona: The city and its art, 1888-1936

THAMES HUDSON LTD

The description for this book, Els Quatre Gats: Art in Barcelona Around 1900, will be forthcoming.

Els Quatre Gats: Art in Barcelona Around 1900

Reference

Princeton University Press

The description for this book, Els Quatre Gats: Art in Barcelona Around 1900, will be forthcoming.

With 310 illustrations in full color. Bound in the publisher's original black cloth with the front cover stamped in blind and the spine stamped in gilt.

Picasso Painter and Sculptor in Clay

Harry N. Abrams

Portraiture has managed to flourish in modern painting in spite of the popularization of photography, the decline of traditional patronage, and modernism's increasing emphasis on abstraction. However problematic modern styles have been for representational art, painters have continued to discover new possibilities in the imaging of the human face. This book explores the challenge of the modernist portrait through the multiple solutions proposed by its foremost protagonist and, in so doing, becomes the first volume ever published on the subject of Picasso and portraiture. The hundreds of works reproduced here - most of them unfamiliar, some virtually unknown - demonstrate the remarkable range of Picasso's experimentation in all its stylistic and psychological diversity. The book opens with an authoritative, broad-ranging essay by William Rubin; the nine essays that follow - all by major contemporary scholars and critics - examine different periods and aspects of Picasso's career and clarify personal relationships between the artist and his subjects. It closes with an essay by Mr. Rubin on the late portraits. Numerous photographs, some never before published and many by outstanding photographers, present the portrait subjects as seen through the eye of the camera. This book, published to accompany a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, opening in April 1996, no doubt will long remain the definitive work on its subject.

Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation

RUBIN, William

Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

Daix, Pierre

VARNEDOE, Kirk

Baldassari, Anne

Seckel, Helene

Rosenblum, Robert

Léal, Brigitte

Grand Palais (Paris, France)

FitzGerald, Michæl C.

Museum of Modern Art

In 1900 Pablo Picasso went to Paris to visit the Universal Exhibition and experience life in the art capital of the world. His training had been in provincial Spanish art schools, but in the space of just a year he was offered an exhibition at the prestigious Vollard Gallery. A few years later he was challenging Matisse for the position of leader of the French avant-garde. This book follows Picasso’s discovery of art and life in the French capital, and examines his response to specific artists, including Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, and Cézanne. Amid the distractions of the bohemian district of Montmartre, he began to forge a personal style, which blurred the distinctions between imitation and reality, culminating in perhaps the most seminal painting of the 20th century, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Picasso in Paris: 1900 - 1907

Vendome Press

Shows and describes some of Picasso's earliest artwork and discusses influences on his work

Picasso--The Early Years, 1892-1906

Museum Of Fine Arts, Boston

National Gallery of Art (U.S.)

Staller, Natasha

PICASSO, Pablo

Natl Gallery of Art

This facsimile of a Picasso sketchbook is reproduced in such detail that readers can track the master's red marker pen bleeding through from one side of a page to the next--a subject's varnished nails appear on the verso as abstracted hatchmarks, and the red of her lips as a squiggle. Picasso began The Berggruen Album on November 5, 1970, days after his eighty-ninth birthday, in his words, "to make sure my hand has not developed a wobble." He had just conceived a series of a dozen powerful canvases inspired by the bullfights at Frejus, and in these delicate, sexual, voyeuristic sketches, he proves his soundness of body and personality, his unmatchable fitness to paint. An index of thumbnail sized prints pairs many of the works that inspired them or evolved from them, from Ingres to finished Picassos. The book closes with essays by Marilyn McCully and John Richardson, whose A Life of Picasso won the Whitbread Prize.

Picasso: The Berggruen Album

Richardson,John

Individual Artists

Mitchell-Innes & Nash

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