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Picasso and portraiture : representation and transformation / edited by William Rubin ; with essays by Anne Baldassari ... [et al.]

Contributor(s): Picasso, Pablo, 1881-1973 | Rubin, William Stanley | Baldassari, Anne | Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.) | Musée Picasso (Paris, France).
Material type: materialTypeLabelBookPublisher: New York : Museum of Modern Art, 1996Description: 496 p. : col. ill. ; 31 cm. + hbk.ISBN: 0870701436 ; 0870701428 .Subject(s): Picasso, Pablo, 1881-1973 -- Exhibitions | Portrait painting, French | Artists -- France -- BiographyDDC classification: 759.6 PIC
Contents:
Reflections on Picasso and portraiture / William Rubin -- Picasso's self-portraits / Kirk Varnedoe -- Three portrait-manifestoes of poets : André Salmon, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Max Jacob / Hélène Seckel -- "Heads faces and bodies: Picasso's uses of portrait photographs / Anne Baldassari -- To fall "like a fly into the trap of Picasso's stare" : portraiture in the early work / Marilyn McCully -- Portraiture in Picasso's primitivism and cubism / Pierre Daix -- The modernists' dilemma : neoclassicism and the portrayal of Olga Khokhlova / Michael C. FitzGerald -- Picasso's blond muse : the reign of Marie-Thérèse Walter / Robert Rosenblum -- "For charming Dora" : portraits of Dora Maar / Brigitte Léal -- A triangle of ambitions : art, politics, and family during the postwar years with Françoise Gilot / Michael C. FitzGerald -- The Jacqueline portraits in the pattern of Picasso's art / William Rubin.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

"Published on the occasion of the exhibition ... the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in collaboration with the Musée Picasso, Paris"--T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Reflections on Picasso and portraiture / William Rubin -- Picasso's self-portraits / Kirk Varnedoe -- Three portrait-manifestoes of poets : André Salmon, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Max Jacob / Hélène Seckel -- "Heads faces and bodies: Picasso's uses of portrait photographs / Anne Baldassari -- To fall "like a fly into the trap of Picasso's stare" : portraiture in the early work / Marilyn McCully -- Portraiture in Picasso's primitivism and cubism / Pierre Daix -- The modernists' dilemma : neoclassicism and the portrayal of Olga Khokhlova / Michael C. FitzGerald -- Picasso's blond muse : the reign of Marie-Thérèse Walter / Robert Rosenblum -- "For charming Dora" : portraits of Dora Maar / Brigitte Léal -- A triangle of ambitions : art, politics, and family during the postwar years with Françoise Gilot / Michael C. FitzGerald -- The Jacqueline portraits in the pattern of Picasso's art / William Rubin.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

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 Françoise 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. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved