Find out about Pablo Picasso and his work
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881 - 1973) was a Spanish painter and sculptor and very prominent in twentieth century art. Find out about:
- Picasso's art and where you can see it in museums, art galleries, exhibitions and websites
- books and articles about his Picasso's life and artwork;
- other resources for artists wanting to know more about Picasso
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- Pablo Picasso - official website
- BOOKS: John Richardson - art historian and biographer of Picasso
- Websites about Picasso
- BOOKS: Biographies of Picasso
- BOOKS: Detailed commentaries on Picasso and his work
- STOP PRESS!!!
- Picasso in Art Galleries and Museums
- BOOKS: About Picasso and his art
- Picasso and Exhibitions
- Articles about Picasso
- VIDEOS: Picasso
- Del.icio.us bookmarks about Picasso
- Picasso and Photography
- Comments and suggestions
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Picasso - copyright
Pablo Picasso - official website
- Pablo Picasso : official web site
- Pablo Picasso official web site. His life, biography, paintings, sculptures and studios. On line requests for the use of Picasso's works, name and image. Selection of books, exhibitions and museums.
- Picasso : his life
- Pablo Picasso official web site. His genealogy and heirs
- Picasso : questions of rights
- Pablo Picasso official web site. Explanation of "The Succession Picasso" and all rights relating to Picasso's heirs and his estate and administration of same.
- picasso : SEEING LEARNING
- Pablo Picasso official web site - listing of all current exhibitions
- Guardian - Web sights: Fit for Picasso
- The artist would surely approve of this most comprehensive and extensive website devoted entirely to him.
BOOKS: John Richardson - art historian and biographer of Picasso
Books on Amazon
He has written for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair and was also instrumental in setting up Christie's in the United States.
In 1993 he was made a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In 1995-96 he served as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University. He divides his time between Connecticut and New York City.
A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881-1906
October 2007 reprint (paperback)
Amazon.com: As he magnificently combines meticulous scholarship with irresistible narrative appeal, Richardson draws on his close friendship with Picasso, his own diaries, the collaboration of Picasso's widow Jacqueline, and unprecedented access to Picasso's studio and papers to arrive at a profound understanding of the artist and his work. 800 photos.
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A Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel, 1907-1916
October 2007 reprint (paperback)
Amazon.com: In The Cubist Rebel, 1907-1916, the second volume of his Life of Picasso, John Richardson reveals the young Picasso in the Baudelairean role of "the painter of modern life"-a role that stipulated the brothel as the noblest subject for a modern artist. Hence his great breakthrough painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, with which this book opens. As well as portraying Picasso as a revolutionary, Richardson analyzes the more compassionate side of his genius. The misogynist of posthumous legend turns out to have been surprisingly vulnerable-more often sinned against than sinning. Heartbroken at the death of his mistress Eva, Picasso tried desperately to find a wife. Richardson recounts the untold story of how his two great loves of 1915-17 successively turned him down. These disappointments, as well as his horror at the outbreak of World War I and the wounds it inflicted on his closest friends, Braque and Apollinaire, shadowed his painting and drove him off to work for the Ballets Russes in Rome and Naples-back to the ancient world.
In this volume we see the artist's life and work during the crucial decade of 1907-17, a period during which Picasso and Georges Braque devised what has come to be known as cubism and in doing so engendered modernism. Thanks to the author's friendship with Picasso and some of the women in his life, as well as Braque and their dealer, D. H. Kahnweiler, and other associates, he has had access to untapped sources and unpublished material. In The Cubist Rebel, Richardson also introduces us to key figures in Picasso's life who have been totally overlooked by previous biographers. Among these are the artist's Chilean patron, collector, and mother figure, Eugenia Errázuriz, as well as two fiancées: the loveable Geneviève Laporte and the promiscuous bisexual painter Irène Lagut.
By harnessing biography to art history, he has managed to crack the code of cubism more successfully than any of his predecessors. And by bringing fresh light to bear on the artist's private life, he has succeeded in coming up with a new view of this paradoxical man and of his paradoxical work. Never before have Picasso's revolutionary vision, technical versatility, prodigious achievements, and, not least, his sardonic humor been analyzed with such clarity.
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A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Vol 3)
November 2007 1st edition 608 pages (hardback)
Amazon.com: The long-awaited third volume of John Richardson's definitive biography of Pablo Picasso combines the critical astuteness, exhaustive research, and stunning narrative that made the first two volumes an art-historical breakthrough as well as a pleasure to read.
The Triumphant Years takes up the artist's life in 1917, when Picasso and Cocteau left wartime Paris for Rome to work with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes on their revolutionary production of Parade. Visits to Naples, above all to the Farnese marbles in the Museo Nazionale, would leave Picasso with a lifelong obsession with classical sculpture as well as the self-referential commedia dell'arte. After returning to Paris and marrying one of Diaghilev's ballerinas, Olga Khokhlova, he abandoned bohemia for the drawing rooms of Paris. Hence, his so-called Duchess period, which coincided with his switch to neoclassicism, and would ultimately be absorbed into a metamorphic form of cubism.
In the summer of 1923, Picasso and his American friends Gerald and Sara Murphy transformed the French Riviera from a winter into a summer resort, when they persuaded the proprietor of the Hôtel du Cap at Antibes to keep the place open for the summer. In doing so, they made the Riviera Europe's major playground. Mediterraneanism was in Picasso's bones. Born in Málaga, he would always identify with this inland sea.
In 1927 the artist's life underwent a major change; he abandoned society for a life out of the spotlight with a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl, Marie-Thérèse Walter. His erotic obsession with Marie-Thérèse would result in an ever-growing antipathy for his neurasthenic, understandably jealous wife. Balletic clues have enabled Richardson to identify a number of baffling figure-paintings as portrayals of Olga and reinterpret the work of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Picasso's passionate love for his mistress and his passionate hatred for his wife can be fully understood only in light of each other.
The last three chapters constitute an annus mirabilis-spring 1931 to spring 1932-during which the artist celebrated his fiftieth birthday. Challenged to scale new heights by the passage of time, Picasso lived up to his shamanic belief that painting should have a magic function. In the course of this year, he reinvented sculpture and to a great extent his own imagery in a bid to Picassify the classical tradition. The resultant retrospective in Paris and Zurich in the summer of 1932 confirmed Picasso as the leader of the modern movement.
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The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper
September 2001 (paperback)
Amazon.com: The sorcerer (art collector Douglas Cooper) and his apprentice (Richardson) lived for 10 years in the grandiose "folly" Château de Castille in Provence, where they entertained a circle that included Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Angus Wilson, Tennessee Williams, and a range of other usual suspects from that period's artistic fraternity.
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Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters: Beaton, Capote, Dalí, Picasso, Freud, Warhol, and More
November 2001 (hardback)
Amazon.com: From the scandalous murder trial of a French art dealer's widow to photographer-designer Cecil Beaton's peculiar "romance" with Greta Garbo, this sinfully entertaining book lets readers brush up on 20th-century cultural history and the vagaries of human nature at the same time. While we wait for volume III of John Richardson's acclaimed Life of Picasso, the 28 sketches assembled here make an agreeable diversion, revealing Richardson's lighter side and formidable knowledge of art history. Admiring portraits of Chilean collector Eugenia Errazuriz ("Picasso's Other Mother") and British painter Lucian Freud are among the very few laudatory pieces in a collection notable for its enjoyable emphasis on the less edifying traits of the rich and/or famous. The Sitwells were spiteful mythomaniacs. Armand Hammer was "a veteran con man." As for the sexual proclivities of Salvador Dalí and his wife Gala... well, Richardson gives you all the gory details, some of which would have impressed the Marquis de Sade. Richardson appears as a character in several pieces: he worked for Hammer, spent a summer with Truman Capote in Venice, and sat for a portrait by Andy Warhol. But these appearances seldom seem self-aggrandizing; they're integrated into the essays with the same smoothness that distinguishes his prose. --Wendy Smith
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Websites about Picasso
- On-line Picasso Project Homepage
- On-line Picasso Project - this is a simplay n amazing site and provides a biography and a comprehensive illustrated catelogue of his works in the form of a timeline. Only inspection of a resource like this makes you realise just how prolific Picasso was as an artist.
The creator and Director of the project is Dr. Enrique Mallen, Professor & Picasso Specialist, Sam Houston State University & Texas A&M University. A number of other people collaborated on the project and are also listed - Pablo Picasso - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- The Pablo Picasso page on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Pablo Picasso - Wikiquote
- The Pablo Picasso page on Wikiquote - providing quotations by Picasso. These should indicate whether they are sourced or unsourced.
- Pablo Picasso - Wikimedia Commons
- Images relating to Pablo Picasso From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository
Note that works by this artist are not in the public domain. They are protected by international copyright laws at least until 70 years after his/her death. - Pablo Picasso - The Most Famous Artist of the 20th Century - The Art History Archive
- An overview of Picasso's life and work by period - with images.
- The Artchive - Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)
- The site considers the different periods of Picasso's work
- Famous Artists Gallery: Pablo Picasso
- A painting by Pablo Picasso: Sleeping Peasants - 1919
BOOKS: Biographies of Picasso
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Life with Picasso
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Picasso (25 Spring)
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Picasso : A Biography
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Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973: Genius of the Century (Basic Art)
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BOOKS: Detailed commentaries on Picasso and his work
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Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art
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Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
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PICASSO BIRTH OF A GENIUS
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Picasso Museum in Paris closed for refurbishment for 2+ years - reopening end of 2012
Picasso in Art Galleries and Museums
- Museu Picasso, Barcelona, Spain
- Picasso Museum in Barcelona
- Musee national Picasso Paris (Pablo Picasso museum)
- This is the website of the official National Picasson Museum in Paris - which I have visited and very much recommend to anybody visiting Paris. The very extensive collection of his work is NOT reflected in this website but it does provide details (in French) of address and how to visit the museum.
MUSEUM NOW CLOSED FOR MAJOR RENOVATIONS AND EXPANSION UNTIL 2012 - Museo Picasso Málaga
- Picasso Museum in Malaga, Spain
- Musee Picasso
- Picasso Museum in Antibes
- Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) | Thematic Essay | Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Timeline for Picasso (1881 - 1973)
- Gemeentemuseum Den Haag - Picasso Exhibition 15 December 2007 - 30 March 2008
- the Museum Ludwig in Cologne is renowned for its huge holdings of works by Pablo Picasso....a major Picasso retrospective, including paintings, drawings, ceramics and photographs, will come to The Hague.
- National Gallery of Art, Washington - works by Pablo Picasso
- Artist Pablo Picasso Spanish, 1881 - 1973
- Musee national Picasso La Guerre et la Paix - Vallauris
- Site officiel du musee national Picasso La Guerre et la Paix de Vallauris. Presentation de la chapelle de Vallauris et de l'oeuvre, La Guerre et la Paix, qui la d%uFFFDcore. Informations pratiques et programme des activit%uFFFDs culturelles...
Pablo Picasso "Picasso on Art"
BOOKS: About Picasso and his art
books on Amazon
The Ultimate Picasso
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Myth and Metamorphosis: Picasso's Classical Prints of the 1930s
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Picasso in his Posters: Image and Work; 4 Volume Set (Spanish Edition)
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Picasso and American Art
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Picasso and Exhibitions
Exhibitions of Picasso's work or about Picasso
- The Art Newspaper's world exhibitions guide - exhibitions involving Picasso
- The link is a seach facility so information about exhibitions should remain current.
- MoMA.org | Exhibitions | 1996 | Picasso and Portraiture
- This first comprehensive survey of the portrait work of Pablo Picasso featured more than 130 paintings and 100 drawings and prints. The exhibition was organized by William Rubin, Director Emeritus, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, in collaboration with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris.
- MoMA.org | Exhibitions | 2008 | Focus: Picasso Sculpture
- Focus: Picasso Sculpture
July 3-November 3, 2008
Pablo Picasso is perhaps best known for his paintings, but his sculptures are among the most radical, thought-changing artworks of the modern period. While the artist's two-dimensional work was frequently exhibited during his lifetime, the first comprehensive exhibition of Picasso's sculpture was mounted in 1966, when the artist was eighty-five years old. This installation provides a broad overview of the artist's career as a creator of three-dimensional objects through selections from The Museum of Modern Art's collection. - Picasso - Delacroix | Louvre Museum
- Coinciding with the major exhibition "Picasso and his Masters" held at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, the Louvre presents around 20 painted and graphic variations on Delacroix's Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834), executed by Picasso in 1954-55.
- Musée d'Orsay: Picasso / Manet: Le déjeuner sur l'herbe
- Throughout his career, Picasso went back to Cranach, Poussin, Velasquez, Rembrandt, David, Delacroix and Courbet. But his experiment with Manet's painting was, without doubt, the most profound and the most complex he ever undertook.
- ARTINFO Artists - Pablo Picasso
- Galleries and current and upcoming exhibitions
- NG London/Future Exhibitions: Picasso: Challenging the Past
- 25 February - 7 June 2009
Picasso, the greatest artist of the 20th century, pitted himself against the Old Masters in a life-long artistic dialogue. "Picasso: Challenging the Past" will explore the ways he took up the artistic concerns of these painters and made audacious paintings of his own. - Picasso v Old Masters at The National Gallery
- Video tour with Times Chief Art Critic, Rachel Campbell Johnston round the new Picasso, Changing The Past exhibition at the National Gallery in London, UK.
- Picasso: Challenging the Past, National Gallery, London WC2 - Times Online
- This show hits you straight in the face like the force of an explosion. Here is a talent as savagely destructive as it is creative, as ruthlessly mocking as it is admiring, as vulgarly garish as it is susceptible.
It is this ferociously competitive talent that is explored in a landmark show that brings a brash Modernist into the National Gallery's hallowed halls of high culture. - Finnish National Gallery - Picasso
- In autumn 2009, Ateneum Art Museum will open a unique, extensive exhibition of the work of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). All phases of the artist's production are comprehensively presented in this exhibition featuring some two hundred works, all of them coming to Ateneum from the collections of the Musée National Picasso in Paris. Before arriving at Ateneum, these collections have been on view e.g. at the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the National Art Centre in Tokyo. After Ateneum, this exhibition will be seen in e.g. Hamburg. Helsinki is the only Scandinavian city hosting this Picasso exhibition. The exhibition seen at Ateneum will be curated by Anne Baldassari, Director of the Musée National Picasso in Paris.
- Picasso and Provence
- A special page to discover the art of Picasso in Provence Cote d'Azur with articles and special events -
- Tate Liverpool - Picasso: Peace and Freedom 21 May - 30 August 2010
- Presented at Tate Liverpool from 21 May to 30 August 2010; this exhibition will reveal a fascinating new insight into the artist's life as a tireless political activist and campaigner for peace, challenging the widely held view of the artist as creative genius, playboy and compulsive extrovert.
This is the first exhibition to explore the post-War period of the artist's life in depth, and will reflect a new Picasso for a new time. The exhibition provides a timely look at Picasso's work in the Cold War era and how the artist transcended the ideological and aesthetic oppositions of East and West. - Guardian - Picasso: Challenging the Past at the National Gallery (slideshow)
- Picasso spent a great deal of his working life directly measuring himself against and responding to the great masters of European painting.
Picasso: Challenging the Past, his first exhibition at the National Gallery, places his work in the context of the permanent collection, inviting a reassessment of the Spanish master and his inspiration
Articles about Picasso
- Guardian: Picasso's eyes perceived the infinite complexity of life
- Jonathan Jones: As the National Gallery prepares for its first Pablo Picasso exhibition, a look back at his work reveals its enduring genius
- Guardian: A momentous, tremendous exhibition
- Two of the giants of modern art go head to head in Tate Modern's new show. Adrian Searle is thrilled by his sneak preview.
- Guardian: Why Picasso's masterpiece is as relevant as it ever was
- As Guernica returns to London, Jonathan Jones argues for its continuing vitality
- Guardian: Picasso's Guernica battle lives on
- As Spain commemorates the 70th anniversary of the Guernica bombing, should the famous masterpiece be relocated to the Basque country?
- Guardian: Celebrating Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
- 100 years on, Picasso's awkward and provocative painting is still a monumental work of modern art.
- Guardian: Paris match: Museums unite for Picasso season
- Grand Palais, Louvre and Musée d'Orsay decide to work together to display Spanish master
- Guardian: Museums unite for Picasso one-off
- The most comprehensive exhibition ever of the works of Pablo Picasso has just opened at the Reina Sofia gallery in Madrid
- New York Times - Picasso, Who Let His Imagination Run From Art to Language
- In "Picasso and the Allure of Language," at Yale University Art Gallery, some 70 works chronicle the influence of language on the artist from 1900, when he was 19, to 1969, just four years before his death at 91. The exhibition also reunites, for the first time, artworks by Picasso originally owned by Gertrude and Leo Stein with materials from the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers held at the university's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
- Guardian - The many faces of Pablo Picasso
- Was he a playful genius, as some suggest, or a capricious and cruel misanthrope who left battered lives in his wake? On the eve of a new show in London, we speak to his closest friends and family in a…
- Picasso and his erotic muse Marie-Thérèse Walter - Times Online
- Marie-Thérèse Walter inspired many of the artist's most passionate paintings, yet she is often erased from the family history. On the eve of a landmark exhibition, Diana Widmaier-Picasso, their granddaughter, recounts the turbulent story to Morgan Falconer
- Picasso is the great comedian of modern art | Derwent May - Times Online
- If you go to the new London exhibition of the 20th-century's greatest painter, be prepared to have a laugh with him
- Picasso's Blue Period 1901-04 | Art Knowledge News
- Pablo Picasso one of the founders of modern abstract art, generally associated with cubism and related styles, at the time of Picasso's blue period, 1901-1904, abstract art as we know it today didn't yet exist.
- New Statesman - From the NS archive: John Berger on Picasso
- It was at the New Statesman that John Berger made his reputation, contributing his first article in 1951 at the age of 24 and writing regularly thereafter as the magazine%uFFFDs art critic. In this extract he explains the appeal of Pablo Picasso
- Guardian - Picasso finds new lease of life in Antibes
- Works created by Picasso during his stay in Antibes reflect the light and lore of the seaside town, and a revival of the painter's spirits
- Guardian - £6.9m Picasso sketchbook stolen in Paris
- A Picasso sketchbook worth more than %u20AC8m (£6.9m) has been stolen from a Paris museum dedicated to the artist, where it is believed to have been kept in an unlocked cabinet.
- Guardian - Tate Liverpool exhibition to celebrate political Picasso
- Picasso's cold war career as a highly political painter, peace campaigner and tireless fundraiser for leftwing causes will be revealed in an exhibition at Tate Liverpool next spring that will include letters from world leaders, including Nelson Mandela and Ho Chi Minh, as well as a telegram from Fidel Castro congratulating the artist on being awarded the Soviet Union's international peace prize.
- Guardian - Picasso v the old masters? No contest
- Jonathan Jones: The National Gallery's retrospective pits the Spanish genius against the all-time greats. So how does he fare?
Del.icio.us bookmarks about Picasso
Picasso and Photography
- Joan Fontcuba - the artist and the photograph: Pablo Picasso
- DIURNES: WORKING NOTES Notes about Picasso's use of photography and access to photographs
Comments and suggestions
Please leave a comment or any suggestions about how to improve this lens
EverythingMouse wrote...
A brilliant resource - thank you for putting this together.
Posted October 12, 2008
wrote
Fantastic lens, I have just started to appreciate his art and have committed myself to building a lens that features interesting pieces from each of his periods. Still a work in progress though, and I am still at the Blue Period. Please tell me what you think, visit Pablo Picasso Paintings.
Posted August 30, 2008
Harry wrote
Please - help me I have a friend who has said the Picasso - painted Sleeping Venice is this true Thank You
Posted May 22, 2008
BarbosaArt wrote...
I am a big fan of Picasso! 5 stars and a lensroll to The Starving Artist
Posted November 17, 2007
and finally......
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