Picasso and Africa illustrates how African art as well as African culture influenced Picasso in his art.

Through works of art, photographs, and writings, this volume explores Picasso’s fascination with tribal art and the influences he repeatedly drew upon for his own oeuvre. “African art? I don’t know it.” With this provocative tone, Picasso tried to deny his relationship with art from outside of Europe. However, through hundreds of archival documents and photographs, this volume illustrates how tribal art from Africa, Oceania, the Americas, and Asia was a recurring source of inspiration for the artist. Side-by-side comparisons illustrate the links between Picasso’s oeuvre and diverse tribal arts. In both, we find the same themes—nudity, sexuality, impulses, death, and more—along with parallel artistic expressions of those themes—such as disfiguration or destruction of the body. The volume is completed with a chronology of the relevant works and photographs of the artist in his studio.

In Picasso's Demoiselles, eminent art historian Suzanne Preston Blier uncovers the previously unknown history of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, one of the twentieth century's most important, celebrated, and studied paintings. Drawing on her expertise in African art and newly discovered sources, Blier reads the painting not as a simple bordello scene but as Picasso's interpretation of the diversity of representations of women from around the world that he encountered in photographs and sculptures. These representations are central to understanding the painting's creation and help identify the demoiselles as global figures, mothers, grandmothers, lovers, and sisters, as well as part of the colonial world Picasso inhabited. Simply put, Blier fundamentally transforms what we know about this revolutionary and iconic work.

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

Reading African art’s impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The “Black Art” Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde “discovery” of African sculpture—known then as art nègre, or “black art”—eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, “black art” evolved as a framework for asserting control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of Negritude and the École de Dakar, African sculpture’s influence proved transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history’s alleged centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually informing. The “Black Art” Renaissance reveals just how much modern art has owed to African art on a global scale.

Pablo Picasso redefined artwork throughout his extraordinary career, becoming indisputably one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. In this evocative volume, the artist’s granddaughter, Diana Widmaier Picasso, curates the 100 quintessential, unique works that define the evolution of this illustrious artist, creating a stunning compendium of pieces that simply could never all be acquired by a single collector. Casual art lovers know his Cubist work and the Guernica, but Picasso: The Impossible Collection manages to go deeper, revealing and revisiting some less ubiquitous yet equally powerful paintings, prints, sculptures and photographs from Picasso’s astonishing oeuvre.

This year marks the eightieth anniversary of the bombing of the Basque town of Gernika in Spain. Pablo Picasso created his iconic, anti-fascist painting, Guernica (1937), in protest against that attack and others targeted at civilian populations. This book, published alongside the exhibition, Guernica Remakings, explores the ongoing power of Picasso?s Guernica through a series of contemporary reworkings that continue to locate the iconic image within political protest. The featured artworks demonstrate the longevity and versatility of the original as it morphed from Picasso?s canvas, painted in 1937, to a tapestry in 1955, a textile artwork in 2010, a theatrical production in 2011-12 and a protest banner in 2012-14. Guernica?s humanitarian message is still relevant; it calls for solidarity and compassion across borders. Traversing geographical boundaries with each remaking it connects Spain and France, to the USA, UK, South Africa, Canada and India. The voices of those involved in creating the artworks are heard alongside the curator and maker, Dr Nicola Ashmore. 00Exhibition: University of Brighton, Gallery, UK (28.07.-23.08.2017).

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.

"Published to accompany a major exhibition at Tate Britain, this fully illustrated catalogue explores the history of attacks on art in Britain, from the reformation of the sixteenth century to the present day, demonstrating how religious, political, moral and aesthetic controversy can become arenas for assaults on art. Through eight essays, the broad subject of iconoclasm is broken into three overarching themes: the state-sanctioned iconoclastic zeal of religious reformers, who aimed to purge both churches and minds of the sin of idolatry; the symbolic statue-breaking that accompanies political change such as the targeted attacks on cultural heritage by the suffragettes; and attacks on art by individuals stimulated by a moral or aesthetic outrage. Importantly, the aim of the study is to present the rationale of iconoclasm, its significance to the history of an object, and how it has become a productive and transformational practice for some modern and contemporary artists."--Publisher's description.

"Picasso once famously - and provocatively - declared that he was not acquainted with African art. yet hundreds of archival documents and photographs - in addition to reproductions of his artworks alongside so-called "primitive" works from Africa and Oceania, as well as the Americas and Asia - illustrate how such art was a continual source of inspiration for the master artist throughout his career. Divided into three parts, this comprehensive tome explores Picasso's fascination with art from outside of Europe. A chronology - spanning from his arrival in Paris in 1900 to 1974, the year following his death - highlights the principal points of intersection between the artist and "primitive" art: where he encountered it, which pieces he collected, and the resonances found in his own creations. Each date is elucidated through facts, testimonial accounts, and photographs, as well as comments from Picasso himself. The second part examines the thematic links between Picasso's oeuvre and diverse non-European works, providing side-by-side comparisons that reveal recurrent themes - nudity, sexuality, impulses, death, and more - along with parallel artistic expressions of those themes, such as the disfiguration or destruction of the body. Essays by three authoritative authors complete the exploration, providing context and valuable insight into the influence of these works on Picasso and the lasting and meaningful bond he had with them."