Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation - Hardcover

Baldassari, Anne; Daix, Pierre; Fitzgerald, Michael C.; Leal, Brigitte; McCully, Marilyn; Rosenblum, Robert; Rubin, William; Seckel, Helene; Varnedoe, Kirk; Museum Of Modern Art (New York, N. Y.); Grand Palais (Paris, France)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810961601 ISBN 13: 9780810961609

Publisher: Museum of Modern Art, 1996

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Picasso's portraits display an astonishing range of moods, styles, personalities and approaches, whether abstract, surreal, cubist, classical or expressionist, as revealed by this resplendently illustrated catalogue of an exhibition at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. In the opening essay, Rubin, director emeritus of MOMA's painting and sculpture department, explores how Picasso's portraits served as a screen for his psychological projections and symbolic references to members of his ever-changing entourage. Eight essays by noted critics, including Pierre Daix, Robert Rosenblum, Brigitte Leal and Kirk Varnedoe, emphasize the central role of Picasso's women in his protean portraiture. Blonde muse Marie-Therese Walter, with whom he had a clandestine affair from the mid-1920s to 1933, underwent constant transformations, from instantly recognizable face to mythical goddess. Dora Maar inspired tragic grotesques, while mistress Fernande Olivier appears in many guises, and Francoise Gilot, the young painter whom he met in 1943, triggered images of dread and anxiety in his postwar canvases. Extraordinary self-portraits run the gamut from cocksure bravado to comedic apelike self-caricature. This album is a revelation.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Museum of Modern Art
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0810961601
• ISBN 13: 9780810961609
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496
• Editor: Rubin William, Baldassari Anne