A groundbreaking study of Pablo Picasso, this book documents all Picasso's major works from 1917 to 1937, including La Suite Voillard from the National Gallery of Canada.

A groundbreaking reassessment of Picasso by one of today's preeminent art historians Picasso and Truth offers a breathtaking and original new look at the most significant artist of the modern era. From Pablo Picasso's early The Blue Room to the later Guernica, eminent art historian T. J. Clark offers a striking reassessment of the artist's paintings from the 1920s and 1930s. Why was the space of a room so basic to Picasso's worldview? And what happened to his art when he began to feel that room-space become too confined—too little exposed to the catastrophes of the twentieth century? Clark explores the role of space and the interior, and the battle between intimacy and monstrosity, in Picasso's art. Based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts delivered at the National Gallery of Art, this volume remedies the biographical and idolatrous tendencies of most studies on Picasso, reasserting the structure and substance of the artist's work. With compelling insight, Clark focuses on three central works—the large-scale Guitar and Mandolin on a Table (1924), The Three Dancers (1925), and The Painter and His Model (1927)—and explores Picasso's answer to Nietzsche's belief that the age-old commitment to truth was imploding in modern European culture. Masterful in its historical contextualization, Picasso and Truth rescues Picasso from the celebrity culture that trivializes his accomplishments and returns us to the tragic vision of his art—humane and appalling, naïve and difficult, in mourning for a lost nineteenth century, yet utterly exposed to the hell of Europe between the wars. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.

Exactly when Matisse and Picasso first met is open to debate. Their earliest encounter may have taken place during the Matisse retrospective at Galerie Druet right before the 1906 Salon des Indépendants. The latter marked the first time all the Fauves exhibited together. The centerpiece was Matisse’s monumental Le bonheur de vivre. Leo Stein bought the painting while the Salon was still running, regarding it as “the most important work of our time.” This opinion undoubtedly annoyed Picasso. Jealousy of the other man’s success goaded him to greater innovations. In his view, the new art would have to match the sense of endless discovery that science and technology were offering. The 1900 “Exposition Universelle” had already shown the latest marvels in engineering. If painting wanted to keep the public’s attention, instead of merely reproducing what the eye saw, it had to generate its own reality on the surface of the canvas, a reality more vivid than, and bearing only the most cursory resemblance to, anything found in nature. Matisse was also a catalyst in that he was the one who introduced Picasso to African sculptures. Max Jacob recalls: “Matisse took a black, wooden statuette from a table and showed it to Picasso. It was the first piece of Negro wooden art. Picasso held onto it all evening. The next morning, when I arrived at the studio, the floor was strewn with sheets of paper, and on each sheet was drawn the head of a woman; all of them were more or less the same: one eye, an oversized nose attached to the mouth, and a lock of hair on the shoulders. Cubism was thus born” (cited in Janine Warnod, Washboat Days [New York: Grossman Publishers Warnod, 1972, p. 128]).

Introduction -- The crystallisation of cubism -- Platonism after Cubism -- Mimesis after collage -- Cubism's refuse -- Picasso's sexuality -- Crucifixion and apocalypse -- Rotten sun -- Signed, Picasso.

The Walter and Leonore Annenberg Collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, watercolors, and drawings constitutes one of the most remarkable groupings of avant-garde works of art from the mid-19th to the early 20th century ever given to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A revised and expanded edition of the 1989 publication Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: The Annenberg Collection, this volume presents more than fifty masterworks by such luminaries as Manet, Degas, Morisot, Renoir, Monet, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Matisse, accompanied by elucidating texts and a wealth of comparative illustrations. -- From publisher.

Bringing together leading critics and literary scholars, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism argues for new ways of understanding the nature and development of twentieth-century literature and culture. Scholars have largely understood modernism as an American and European phenomenon. Those parameters have expanded in recent decades, but the incorporation of multiple origins and influences has often been tied to older conceptual frameworks that make it difficult to think of modernism globally. Providing alternative approaches, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism introduces pathways through global archives and new frameworks that offer a richer, more representative set of concepts for the analysis of literary and cultural works. In separate essays each inspired by a critical term, this collection explores what happens to the foundational concepts of modernism and the methods we bring to modernist studies when we approach the field as a global phenomenon. Their work transforms the intellectual paradigms we have long associated with modernism, such as tradition, antiquity, style, and translation. New paradigms, such as context, slum, copy, pantomime, and puppets emerge as the archive extends beyond its European center. In bringing together and reexamining the familiar as well as the emergent, the contributors to this volume offer an invaluable and original approach to studying the intersection of world literature and modernist studies.

1922: Literature, Culture, Politics examines key aspects of culture and history in 1922, a year made famous by the publication of several modernist masterpieces, such as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses. Individual chapters written by leading scholars offer new contexts for the year's significant works of art, philosophy, politics, and literature. 1922 also analyzes both the political and intellectual forces that shaped the cultural interactions of that privileged moment. Although this volume takes post-World War I Europe as its chief focus, American artists and authors also receive thoughtful consideration. In its multiplicity of views, 1922 challenges misconceptions about the 'Lost Generation' of cultural pilgrims who flocked to Paris and Berlin in the 1920s, thus stressing the wider influence of that momentous year.

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.

This groundbreaking book explores the evolving concept of unfinishedness as essential to understanding art movements from the Renaissance to the present day. Unfinished features more than 200 works, created in a variety of media, by artists ranging from Leonardo, Titian, Rembrandt, Turner, and Cézanne to Picasso, Warhol, Twombly, Freud, Richter, and Nauman. What unites these works, across centuries and media, is that each one displays some aspect of being unfinished. Essays and case studies by major contemporary scholars address this key concept from the perspective of both the creator and the viewer, probing the impact that this long artistic trajectory—which can be traced back to the first century—has had on modern and contemporary art. The book investigates the degrees to which instances of incompleteness were accidental or intentional experimental or conceptual. Also included are illuminating interviews with contemporary artists, including Tuymans, Celmins, and Marden, and parallel considerations of the unfinished in literature and film. The result is a multidisciplinary approach and thought-provoking analysis that provide valuable insight into the making, meaning, and critical reception of the unfinished in art.

This volume includes the editorial “The absconded subject of Pop,” by Thomas Crow; “Enlivening the soul in Chinese tombs,” by Wu Hung; “On the ‘true body’ of Huineng,” by Michele Matteini; “Apparition painting,” by Yukio Lippit; “Immanence out of sight,” by Joyce Cheng; “Absconding in plain sight,” by Roberta Bonetti; “Ancient Maya sculptures of Tikal, seen and unseen,” by Megan E. O’Neil; “Style and substance, or why the Cacaxtla paintings were buried,” by Claudia Brittenham; “The Parthenon frieze,” by Clemente Marconi; “Roma sotterranea and the biogenesis of New Jerusalem,” by Irina Oryshkevich; “Out of sight, yet still in place,” by Minou Schraven; “Behind closed doors,” by Melissa R. Katz; “Moving eyes,” by Bissera V. Pentcheva; “‘A secret kind of charm not to be expressed or discerned,’” by Rebecca Zorach; “Ivory towers,” by Richard Taws; “Boxed in,” by Miranda Lash; “A concrete experience of nothing,” by William S. Smith; “Believing in art,” by Irene V. Small; “Repositories of the unconditional,” by Gabriele Guercio; “From micro/macrocosm to the aesthetics of ruins and waste-bodies,” by Jeanette Zwingenberger; “Are shadows transparent?” by Roberto Casati; “Invisibility of the digital,” by Boris Groys; “Des formes et des catégories,” by Remo Guidieri; and “Further comments on ‘Absconding,’” by Francesco Pellizzi.