One of The Christian Science Monitor’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2018 “An engrossing read…a historically and psychologically rich account of the young Picasso and his coteries in Barcelona and Paris” (The Washington Post) and how he achieved his breakthrough and revolutionized modern art through his masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In 1900, eighteen-year-old Pablo Picasso journeyed from Barcelona to Paris, the glittering capital of the art world. For the next several years he endured poverty and neglect before emerging as the leader of a bohemian band of painters, sculptors, and poets. Here he met his first true love and enjoyed his first taste of fame. Decades later Picasso would look back on these years as the happiest of his long life. Recognition came first from the avant-garde, then from daring collectors like Leo and Gertrude Stein. In 1907, Picasso began the vast, disturbing masterpiece known as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Inspired by the painting of Paul Cézanne and the inventions of African and tribal sculpture, Picasso created a work that captured the disorienting experience of modernity itself. The painting proved so shocking that even his friends assumed he’d gone mad, but over the months and years it exerted an ever greater fascination on the most advanced painters and sculptors, ultimately laying the foundation for the most innovative century in the history of art. In Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World, Miles J. Unger “combines the personal story of Picasso’s early years in Paris—his friendships, his romances, his great ambition, his fears—with the larger story of modernism and the avant-garde” (The Christian Science Monitor). This is the story of an artistic genius with a singular creative gift. It is “riveting…This engrossing book chronicles with precision and enthusiasm a painting with lasting impact in today’s art world” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), all of it played out against the backdrop of the world’s most captivating city.

A collection of photographs of Pablo Picasso's life and art, taken by his friend, award-winning photojournalist David Douglas Duncan.

Although he never set foot in Africa, Picasso had a passion for African art. Throughout the course of his life, he assembled a unique collection of statues and masks. Comprising more than 120 objects, Picasso's private collection can now be found in museums in Paris such as the Louvre, Musee Quai Branly and the Musee Picasso, as well as in the private collections of members of Picasso's family. This beautiful book documents the entire collection and examines it as a whole. It features documentary photographs, a section of stunning colour plates, and detailed ethnographic descriptions of each piece, providing a full account of Picasso's relationship with African and Oceanic art. This important publication sheds new light on the fascination non-Western art held for one of twentieth century's most important artists. Review: '...an illuminating and handsome book, copiously illustrated with fascinating original documents and excellent colour reproductions...''... a convenient and also essential reference tool for anyone interested in this important subject.''... an invaluable and also entertaining guide.''... this book not only investigates Picasso's response to tribal art with unusual thoroughness, but also reopens the larger question of the artist's 'primitivism'.'The Burlington Magazine, June 2007

A biography of Picasso written by his grandson.

First published: London: Thames & Hudson, 2010.

''Picasso's still lifes, though less dramatic than his highly charged figurative pictures, include some of his most original, daring and emotionally complex work. This lavish catalogue of a traveling exhibition combines sensitive connoisseurship and ample illustrations (393 plates, 145 in color) to document Picasso's exploration of still lifes in paintings, sculpture, constructions, collages, drawings, prints and ceramics. The great analytical cubist experiments are here, along with many less familiar forays. Boggs, a Picasso scholarsufficient ID?seems circular/it's what this person does all day, every day, so stet.gs , shows how the artist raided the techniques of Cezanne, Rousseau, Braque, Matisse, Zurbaran and Chardin to produce powerful still lifes that bore his distinctive stamp. Bernadac and Leal, curators at the Musee Picasso in Paris, in separate essays investigate his obsession with food imagery and his "Don Juanism," or cheerful, promiscuous mixing of styles.''--

Draws on Penrose's private notebooks and correspondences to offer insight into his friendship with the artistic master, from Penrose's personal observations of Picasso's achievements and behaviors to his recordings of the words and actions of some of the artist's closest friends and family members.