Throughout his life, Picasso turned to the work of earlier masters for inspiration, making paintings, drawings, and prints after their compositions. Susan Grace Galassi, a specialist on Picasso, discusses the most significant examples of these works

In 1656, Diego Velázquez, leading figure in the Spanish Golden Age of painting, created one of the most enigmatic works in the history of art: Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-Waiting). This graphic novel, written and drawn by two of Spain’s most sophisticated comics creators, examines its legacy as one of the first paintings to explore the relationship among the viewer, reality, and unreality. (It guest stars Cano, Salvador Dalí, Zurbarán, and many others.) Olivares’s art moves from clear line to expressionistic; from pen nib to brush stokes; from one color palette to another, as The Ladies-in-Waiting uses fiction to explore the ties among artists and patrons, the past and the present, institutions and audiences, creators and creativity. Their combined efforts have garnered not only international comics prizes, but the equivalent of the National Book Award in Spain, where the book has been a commercial and critical sensation.

Velázquez's 1656 masterpiece Las Meninas has inspired an avalanche of published attention since it was first placed on public view in the Museo del Prado in 1819. The essays in this volume survey the responses to the painting in the nineteenth century, when Velázquez's fame outside Spain peaked. They include introductions to interpretations of Las Meninas by twentieth-century art historians, critics, philosophers, and art theorists, as well as the modern appropriation of the work by Picasso.

One spring morning in 1957, photojournalist David Douglas Duncan paid a visit to his friend and frequent subject Pablo Picasso, at the artist’s home near Cannes. Alongside Duncan in his Mercedes Gullwing 300 SL was the photographer’s pet dachshund, Lump. When they arrived at Picasso’s Villa La Californie, Lump decided that he had found paradise on earth, and that he would move in with Picasso, whether the artist welcomed him or not. This is the background for a book that offers an uncommonly sensitive portrait of Picasso. Lump was immortalized in a Picasso portrait painted on a plate the day they met, but that was just the beginning. In a suite of forty-five paintings reinterpreting Velasquez’s masterpiece 'Las Meninas', Picasso replaced the impassive hound in the foreground with jaunty renderings of Lump. Today all of those historic canvases are now the centerpiece exhibition in the Picasso Museum of Barcelona. Fourteen of the paintings are reproduced here in full colour, juxtaposed with Duncan’s dramatic and intimate black-and-white photographs of Picasso and Lump, bringing full circle the odyssey of a lucky dachshund who found his way to becoming a furry, super-stretched icon of modern art.

This volume tells the story of Picasso's artistic development and his passionate relationship with the European art tradition.