Authors: Luis Martin Lozano. Juan Coronel Rivera.
Hardcover, 674 pages
Publisher: Taschen
Publication Date: 2008-01-25


Reviews :

    Diego in detail: The most comprehensive study of Rivera's work ever made

A veritable folk hero in Latin America and Mexico's most important artist - along with his wife, painter Frida Kahlo - Diego Rivera (1886-1957) led a passionate life devoted to art and communism. After spending the 1910s in Europe, where he surrounded himself with other artists and embraced the Cubist movement, he returned to Mexico and began to paint the large-scale murals for which he is most famous. In his murals, he addressed social and political issues relating to the working class, earning him prophetic status among the peasants of Mexico. He was invited to create works abroad, most notably in the United States, where he stirred up controversy by depicting Lenin in his mural for the Rockefeller Center in New York City (the mural was destroyed before it was finished). Rivera's most remarkable work is his 1932 Detroit Industry, a group of 27 frescos at the Detroit Institute of Art in Michigan....

Authors: Gill Perry. Francis Frascina. Charles Harrison.
Paperback, 280 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication Date: 1993-05-26


Reviews :

    The book presents a survey of art from the first two decades of the 20th century. The authors begin by exploring how aspects of the primitive were invoked by rural artists' colonies formed in France and Germany at the end of the 19th century and by the work of the Fauves and the German Expressionists a few years later. The book then develops an analysis of Cubist works based on semiotic theory, considering the social and cultural values encoded in such signifying systems, and investigating the relationship between representation and ideology. The final chapter considers some problems of interpretation and evolution posed by specific examples of abstract art ranging from Malevich to Mondrian....

Authors: Brigitte Leal. Christine Piot. Marie-Laure Bernadac. Jean Leymarie.
Hardcover, 504 pages
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Publication Date: 2000-11-01


Reviews :

    Of all the books on the man many consider the greatest genius of 20th-century art, this sumptuous work stands out as truly the "ultimate" Picasso. Not only does it cover in one volume all the periods of Pablo Picasso's long, incredibly versatile career-with exquisite reproductions of nearly every significant work he ever created-but the scholarship is impeccable: each of the three authors is a leading authority on a particular period of Picasso's artistic evolution.

Brigitte Léal covers Picasso's formative years from 1881 through 1916, including his invention of Cubism with Georges Braque. Christine Piot explores the astonishingly fertile period from 1917 through 1952. Marie-Laure Bernadac discusses the unabashed vigor of Picasso's later years, from 1953 until his death in 1973. Nearly 1,200 magnificent reproductions, 720 in full color, illustrate Picasso's breathtaking range of artistic expression.

Picasso once boasted that a book would have to be written on him every day to keep up with his creative surges. Perhaps. But for art lovers and students seeking just one book, The Ultimate Picasso is unsurpassed.

BRIGITTE LÉAL is a curator at the Muse Picasso in Paris.

CHRISTINE PIOT contributed to the catalogue raisonn of Picasso's sculpture.

MARIE-LAURE BERNADAC is curator of the Muse National d'Art Moderne (the Georges Pompidou Center), Paris. Previously she was curator of the Muse Picasso in Paris.

1,186 illustrations, 720 in full color, 111/2 x 12"...

    If you had to choose just one book about Pablo Picasso, the most protean artist of the 20th century, what would you look for? Copious, good-quality reproductions. An authoritative account of the way his approach to painting was influenced by his personality, the women in his life, and his awareness of art made by others. An in-depth treatment of key works like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (which Picasso memorably called his "first exorcism painting") and signature themes, like the half-man, half-animal Minotaur. Then there's the question of tone. Some books cast Picasso as a demigod or a destroyer. Others, like art historian John Richardson's A Life of Picasso, offer a more balanced, psychologically penetrating portrait of the artist.

Hefty, elegant, and inclusive, The Ultimate Picasso hits most, though not all, of these marks. It offers more than 1,200 reproductions (nearly 800 in color) spanning the artist's entire career. Smoothly translated from the French, the book weaves biographical detail and discussions of the art into a concise narrative. ("Olga became pregnant in the summer of 1920, and in Picasso's work forms blossomed and flesh took on the massive quality of stone.") The three authors are all experts--Léal and Bernadac are (respectively) present and former curators of the Musée Picasso in Paris, and Piot coauthored the catalogue raisonné of Picasso's sculpture. They clearly explain visual sources, duly acknowledge leading art historians' interpretations, and choose good quotes from contemporaries. Yet the text can be surprisingly skimpy. The 16-page section on Guernica, for example, has barely two pages of discussion about the painting and its genesis. The authors keep an extremely tight focus on their subject, with only as much mention of Picasso's contemporaries or the outside world as is absolutely necessary.

The major flaws, however, are the authors' hyperbolic view of their subject ("Picasso did not paint nature, but the suffering of the men and women of his time, creating from it beauty and truth") and the lack of any psychological insight about the repeated devastation Picasso wreaks on the female form. In this old-fashioned portrait of the male artist as genius, human failings do not exist, unless they belong to somebody else. --Cathy Curtis ...

Authors: Anne Gantefuhrer-Trier.
Paperback, 96 pages
Publisher: Taschen
Publication Date: 2004-12-02


Reviews :

    As you'll find out in this guide to the fundamentals of cubism, there is more to the genre than its most famous proponent. Cubism -- often identified by flattened, geometric shapes, overlapping, simplified forms and fragmented spatial planes -- was quite possibly the most influential movement in 20th-century art. Featured artists: Pablo Picasso, Edmond Fortier, Paul Cizanne, George Braque, Henri Le Fauconnier, Jean Metzinger, Fernand Liger, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, Henri Laurens, Salvador Dalm, Brassao, Robert Delaunay, Raymond Duchamp-Villon... TASCHEN's Basic Art movement and genre series: includes a detailed introduction with approximately 30 photographs, and a timeline of the most important events (political, cultural, scientific, sporting, etc.) that took place during the time period. The body of the book contains a selection of the most important works of the epoch; each is presented on a 2-page spread with a full page image and, on the facing page, a description/interpretation....

Authors: David Cottington.
Paperback, 80 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: 1998-07-13


Reviews :

    Cubism, perhaps the seminal art movement of the twentieth century, is also one of the most complex. It was the product of the decade before the outbreak of war in 1914. France, during this period, was torn by intercity class and international tensions, caught between excitement over the experience of modernity and anxiety about its consequences. Analyzing paintings by Picasso, Braque, Robert and Sonia Delaunay and their associates, David Cottington describes how the artistic avant-garde, and Cubism within it, were formed by that turbulent and complex moment....

Authors: John Berger.
Paperback, 240 pages
Publisher: Vintage
Publication Date: 1993-11-30
Edition: 1st Vintage International Ed

Authors: Neil Cox.
Paperback, 448 pages
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Publication Date: 2000-10


Reviews :

    This is an introduction to cubism, the movement often seen as the single most important development in the history of 20th-century art. The book offers an account of the origins of the style in the dialogue between Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso between 1907 and 1914. It traces cubism's evolution in the work of these two artists as well as Juan Gris, Fernand Leger, Robert Delaunay, Andre Derain, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger and many others. The book situates cubism in the context of its times, and shows how it penetrated artistic activity far beyond painting and sculpture, reinvigorating architecture, graphic design, music and poetry, and transforming the possibilities of photography and film....

Authors: Michael FitzGerald.
Hardcover, 400 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication Date: 2006-10-25
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    ...

Authors: Mark Antliff. Patricia Leighten.
Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Publication Date: 2001-12


Reviews :

    Often considered to be the seminal art movement of the twentieth century, Cubism initiated a pictorial revolution through its radical approach to image making, invention of the new media of collage and sculptural assemblage, and evolution toward pure abstraction. Scholarly yet accessible, Cubism and Culture reveals these profound formal innovations as integrally related to changes in French society. The authors first examine the movement's origins in primitivism and its engagement with issues of race and colonialism, and then consider the Cubists' responses to anti-Enlightenment philosophies, the relation of Cubist art to the "classical," the role played by gender conceptually and within particular careers and practices, collage and its interplay with cultural themes, and the impact of anarchism, nationalism, and pacifism on Cubism's cultural politics. This comprehensive and fresh examination of Cubism in its wider context—social, cultural, political, scientific, and philosophical—covers the full range of art and artists from the movement's advent in 1908. 182 illustrations, 54 in color.

Among the artists included: Alexander Archipenko
• Maria Blanchard
• Georges Braque
• Robert Delaunay
• Sonia Delaunay
• André Derain
• Marcel Duchamp
• Raymond Duchamp-Villon
• Albert Gleizes
• Juan Gris
• Alice Halicka
• Roger de La Fresnaye
• Marie Laurencin
• Henri Laurens
• Henri Le Fauconnier
• Fernand Léger
• Jacques Lipchitz
• Louis Marcoussis
• Frans Masereel
• Jean Metzinger
• Francis Picabia
• Pablo Picasso...

Authors: Pepe Karmel.
Hardcover, 248 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication Date: 2003-10-11


Reviews :

    This book transforms our understanding of Cubism, showing in unprecedented detail how it emerged in Picasso’s work of the years 1906–13, and tracing its roots in nineteenth-century philosophy and linguistics. Linking well-known paintings and sculptures to the hitherto-ignored drawings that accompanied them, Pepe Karmel demonstrates how Picasso’s quest to depict the human body with greater solidity led, paradoxically, to its fragmentation; and how Picasso used the archaic model of stage space to free himself from conventional perspective, replacing the open window of Renaissance painting with a new projective space. In other chapters, Karmel discusses the empiricist philosophy championed by Hippolyte Taine, which encouraged the breakdown of painting into its abstract elements, and laid the groundwork for an art of mental association rather than naturalistic figuration. Similarly, contemporary philology provided the model for a visual language employing both metaphoric and metonymic (but not arbitrary) signs. Combining intellectual history with close visual reading, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism opens new perspectives on the most influential movement in twentieth-century art....