Picasso: The Berggruen Album

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.