Picasso and Cubism

Gabriel Josipovici

  • Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective edited by William Rubin
    Thames and Hudson, 464 pp, £10.95, July 1980, ISBN 0 500 23310 1
  • Picasso: His Life and Work by Roland Penrose
    Granada, 517 pp, £9.99, May 1981, ISBN 0 7139 1420 3
  • Portrait of Picasso by Roland Penrose
    Thames and Hudson, 128 pp, £3.95, June 1981, ISBN 0 500 27226 3
  • Viva Picasso: A Centennial Celebration, 1881-1981 by Donald Duncan
    Allen Lane, 152 pp, £12.95, May 1981, ISBN 0 7139 1420 3
  • Picasso: The Cubist Years, 1907-1916 by Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet
    Thames and Hudson, 376 pp, £60.00, October 1979, ISBN 0 500 09134 X
  • Picasso’s Guernica: The Labyrinth of Vision by Frank Russell
    Thames and Hudson, 334 pp, £12.50, April 1980, ISBN 0 500 23298 9

Le Mystère Picasso is how Clouzot entitled his famous film, in which the artist was seen at work before our eyes, and for most of its eight decades our century has been vainly trying to decipher that mystery. To talk about Picasso is to talk about the culture of our time, not just because his work has played such an important part in it, but because in the reactions to it we can discern nearly all the myths and clichés of the age. Picasso has been the butt of every anti-Modernist joke in a way Cézanne, for instance, never was, and he has also been our most celebrated artist. The paradox is only superficial, for both attitudes show little interest in the actual work of the hand.

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[*] ‘Fromentin as Critic’, Partisan Review, 1949. Schapiro’s essay on Picasso’s ‘Woman with a Fan’, reprinted in the second volume of his selected papers, Modern Art (Chatto, 1978), is probably the best short piece on Picasso.