Els 4 Gats was a celebrated tavern that served as the main meeting place for avant-garde artists in turn-of-the-century Barcelona. It was the venue for the young Picasso's first one-man exhibition. This text publishes works from this unfamiliar period of Picasso's early artistic life.

"What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way?" With these words, Pablo Picasso described the revolutionary methods of painting and artistic perspective with which he challenged the ways people and the world were defined. His life was a similarly complex prism of people, places, and ideologies that spanned most of the twentieth century. Acclaimed scholar Mary Ann Caws provides in Pablo Picasso a fresh and concise examination of Picasso's life and art, revisiting the themes that occupied him throughout his life and weaving these themes through his crucial close relationships. Caws embarks on a global journey to retrace the footsteps of Picasso, giving biographical context to his work from Les Demoiselles d'Avignon through Guernica and analyzing the changes and inconsistencies in his oeuvre over the course of the twentieth century. She examines Picasso's attempts to balance various viewpoints, artistic strategies, lovers, and friends, positing the central figures of the Harlequin, the clown, and the acrobat in his art as emblematic of his actions. Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Paul Eluard, and Roland Penrose all make appearances in these pages as Caws examines their influence on Picasso. Caws also delves into Picasso's tumultuous relationships with his lovers Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque to understand their effects on his art. A compelling and original portrait, Pablo Picasso offers a lively exploration into the personal networks that both challenged and sustained Picasso.

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.

Catalogus van een tentoonstelling van werk van Catalaanse kunstenaars.

The most important scientist of the twentieth century and the most important artist had their periods of greatest creativity almost simultaneously and in remarkably similar circumstances. This fascinating parallel biography of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso as young men examines their greatest creations -- Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Einstein's special theory of relativity. Miller shows how these breakthroughs arose not only from within their respective fields but from larger currents in the intellectual culture of the times. Ultimately, Miller shows how Einstein and Picasso, in a deep and important sense, were both working on the same problem.

In The Shock of Recognition, Lewis Pyenson examines art and science together to shed new light on common motifs in Picasso’s and Einstein’s education, in European material culture, and in the intellectual life of one nation-state, Argentina.

Memoirs of a Millennium is an engaging and unconventional history of the last millennium, told through the lives of ten individuals across ten centuries. The characters and their compatriots are brought vividly to life by eyewitnesses both sympathetic and unsympathetic, and a colourful cast of subsequent commentators. In this insightful and entertaining book, Ted Pocock uncovers complex webs of humanity in a narrative that moves effortlessly from connection to connection across countries and continents, and from the past to the present and back again. The ten chapters explore the lives and times of the following individuals: 1000: Vladimir of Kiev (Russia) 1100: Godfrey of Bouillon (Palestine and the Holy Land) 1200: Jayavarman VII of Angkor (Cambodia) 1300: Devorguilla of Galloway (England and Scotland) 1400: Tamburlaine of Samarkand (Central Asia) 1500: Marcantonio Raimondi of Bologna (Italy) 1600: Toyotomi Hideyoshi of Osaka (Japan) 1700: Sophie Charlotte of Prussia (Germany) 1800: John Ledyard of Connecticut (USA) 1900: Yuan Shikai of Beijing (China) The scholarship is dazzling, the prose elegant and witty, the rich digressions into related themes irresistible. The successive eras come alive and the compelling text keeps the reader in thral.' Dr Helen Ibbitson Jessup

Traces the history of the European cabaret, discusses the types of entertainment that developed in cabarets, and explains their connection with avant-garde movements.