The career of the greatest painter of the twentieth century was played out in the shadow of Eros -- and of Thanatos. At the age of eight Picasso's first drawings already displayed a precocious interest in the female form, and in the days leading up to his death he was still working obsessively on sketches of the female sex. At the turn of the century the young Picasso created drawings and watercolors inspired by the bordellos of Barcelona which he frequented. These works mix desire, fascination, but also comedy and the grotesque alongside the ever-present fear of disease. They would result, seven years later, in his masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. The works in this ground-breaking book include erotic drawings formal and informal, sketches in notebooks hidden in drawers and private collections, and occasionally paintings and sculptures. Through all these works the essays by an international team of scholars, analyse the primeval notion of desire in Picasso's work, as well as his relation to voyeurism and exhibitionism, to artist and model. Whether through playful or hallucinatory forms, Picasso's representation of the desiring and desired body has become a pivotal moment in the history of twentieth-century art. Produced to accompany a major exhibition in Paris, Montreal and Barcelona, Picasso Erotique is a unique examination of the central theme in Picasso's work.

Picasso's granddaughter introduces readers to a sublime selection of the artist's erotic masterpieces, brought together in this lush and elegant volume. Pablo Picasso lived life as he painted it-with sensual energy and abandon. Nearly every woman whom he loved has been immortalized in his work, from the playful nudes of his early years to the classical representations of the twenties and the more frankly sexual paintings that crowned his career. With mesmerizing color and an appealing design, this chronologically arranged volume follows Picasso's artistic development as expressed in more than ninety erotically charged works. Exquisitely reproduced paintings and etchings such as Salomé Dancing Nude in Front of Herod, Demoiselles d'Avignon, and the famous Pisseuse are displayed alongside fragments from Picasso's love letters and his revealing observations about the role of sensuality in his life. Diana Widmaier Picasso comments on her grandfather's amorous adventures, offering intimate revelations and insights that transform this beautiful book into a personal reflection of one man's consuming passion.

Sheds new light on Picasso’s oeuvre and provides striking confirmation of his belief in art as a venue for the uninhibited expression of human desires. When Japanese ukiyo-e woodcut prints arrived in the European art world of the late nineteenth century, they caused a sensation and influenced artists as diverse as van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Rodin. Picasso first encountered their bold stylization and expressive flair as a young artist in Barcelona, but his connection with Japanese art has been comparatively neglected by critical studies until now. Although Picasso expressed an ambivalent attitude to the Japonisme movement, it has recently been discovered that he personally owned more than sixty of the highly erotic prints known as shunga. Now a selection of these rare works from his private collection has been brought together by the Museu Picasso in Barcelona and is shown here for the first time along with Picasso’s own prints and drawings. This juxtaposition reveals a series of fascinating parallels and convergences in terms of both subject matter and composition. The stylistic echoes are most visible in Picasso’s erotic drawings of the first decade of the twentieth century, and in a series of witty and explicit prints made toward the end of his life, which share the frank yet playful attitude to sexual relationships that shines through in the best Japanese works of this genre. Lavishly illustrated with images b y both Japanese printmakers and the Western artists who followed in their stead, the book features essays by Hayakawa Monta, Ricard Bru, Malén Gual, and Diana Widmaier Picasso.

This publication presents a comprehensive catalogue of the works by Pablo Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum. Comprising 34 paintings, 59 drawings, 12 sculptures and ceramics, and more than 400 prints, the collection reflects the full breadth of the artist's multi-sided genius as it asserted itself over the course of his long career.

Reproduces 31 of the artist's late drawings in pen, pencil, crayon, and brush, made during the last thirteen years of his life.

No other painter has had a more lasting influence on twentieth-century art than Pablo Picasso. Among the many phases and styles encompassed by his oeuvre, Picasso's late period--which he spent in Mougins, in the South of France, until his death in 1973--has a very special position. For the highly charged paintings that Picasso made during the last decade of his life, often featuring close-ups of the kiss or copulation, seem to cling with all their might to the artist's intense sensuality, his desire for embrace. They are marked by a great restlessness whose aim must be to exorcise death itself. "Wild" paintings rapidly executed by Picasso's masterly hand, the late canvases stand in marked contrast to the artist's detailed, carefully executed drawings of the same period, which are dominated by a unique joy in narrative. This substantial new volume, edited by Werner Spies, former director of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the most important Picasso expert of our day, examines almost 200 works, including paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, shedding light on the specific methods and dialectics in Picasso's later work. In particular, the sense of the artist's race against time is made clear through the exciting dialogue that emerges here between painting and drawing. As Picasso himself said, "The works that one paints are a way of keeping a diary."

"Pablo Picasso may be the most famous and influential artist of the twentieth century. What few know is that in 1935, at age 54, Picasso stopped painting, and for a time devoted himself entirely to poetry. Even after eventually resuming his visual work, Picasso continued to write, in a characteristic torrent, until 1959 - leaving a body of poems that Andre Breton praised as, "an intimate journal, both of the feelings and the senses, such as has never been kept before." Near the end of his life, Picasso himself would tell a friend that, "long after his death his writing would gain recognition and encyclopedias would say: 'Picasso, Pablo Ruiz - Spanish poet who dabbled in painting, drawing and sculpture.'"" "Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris have overseen a project to translate the majority of this writing into English for the first time. Working from Picasso's Spanish and French (he wrote in both languages), they have enlisted the help of over a dozen colleagues in order to mark, as they note in their introduction, "Picasso's entry into our own time." Picasso's poems are as protean, erotic, scatological, and experimental as his visual art - yet they arrive as a twenty-first century surprise, even for many devotees."

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.