Individual Artists, French Art, Cubism, Art Subjects - General & Miscellaneous, Modern Art

Picasso's Variations on the Masters : Confrontations with the Past

Name: Picasso's Variations on the Masters : Confrontations with the Past
Author: Susan Grace Galassi
ISBN: 9780810937413

by Susan Grace Galassi

Write a review

Overview

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), one of the most radical and forward-looking artists of the twentieth century, was fascinated by the work of his artistic forebears. From his days as a student at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid to his prolific late maturity in the years after World War II, the artist continued to turn for inspiration to the work of his greatest antecedents, including Eugene Delacroix, Edouard Manet, and Paul Gauguin. This illuminating book documents Picasso's variations on the work of earlier masters over the course of his career, revealing the significant role that these works played in his creative thinking. Through this intensive examination, the reader is given a unique opportunity to observe the master's creative process at close range, and to see some of the most important works of European art history through his eyes. The author, a Picasso scholar and Associate Curator of The Frick Collection in New York, discusses the most important of these remarkable paintings, drawings, and prints, from the witty parodies of the artist's youth to his complex encounters in the years after World War II with the masterpieces of Poussin and Velazquez.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Iconoclastic yet deeply rooted in the art of the past, Picasso endlessly copied, reworked, paraphrased and transformed well-known pictures by artists who obsessed himManet, Velzquez, Ingres, Delacroixas well as images by Renoir, El Greco, Rembrandt, Gauguin, Degas, Cranach and Courbet. In Picasso's "variations" on these artists, he pits his powers of invention against the conventions of his predecessors. The detachment afforded by the variations enabled him to revitalize his art, to assess his own position in the western European tradition and to take up lifelong themes. Galassi, an art historian and associate curator of Manhattan's Frick Collection, has produced a handsomely illustrated study that adds a new dimension to our understanding of Picasso's artistic evolution. Picasso's variations range from a wicked 1902 ink-and-crayon sketch parodying Manet's Olympia, to the wrenching ink drawings made in 1932 after Matthias Grnewald's Crucifixion, to an orgiastic rape scene from 1962 possibly modeled on Manet and Poussin. (Dec.)