Publisher's Synopsis
Pablo Picasso was born in 1881 in Malaga, Spain and died in 1973 in Mougers, France. Painter, sculptor, graphic artist, potter and stage designer in one, he changed the face of modern aesthetics through revolutionary innovations in painting and sculpture. The Paris and Dinard sketchbooks of 1928 are among the most fascinating documents of Picasso's entire career. In the manner of "graphic diaries", they provide a precise record of the artist's ideas, some of them formulated at breakneck speed, during the second half of that year. The sketchbooks document one of the most important turning-points in Picasso's style: the resurgence of his interest in abstraction and the deconstruction of form that supplanted the neoclassicism of his earlier work in the 1920s. Dance performances and beach scenes provided the impulse for the new biomorphic forms that characterize the drawings in these sketchbooks. The bold play of organic, sensuous forms in the Dinard sketchbook was inspired by bathers, but also reflects the artist's passionate relationship with his new lover, Marie-Therese Walter. The drawings include combinations of fully-rounded forms of a kind that Picasso was not to translate into sculpture until several years later. And it was in 1928, after a break of 14 years, that he created a new three-dimensional work - an intensely tactile, sensuous piece that contrasts with the cool abstraction of his preliminary sketches, also in the Dinard sketchbook, for a monument to Guillaume Apollinaire that was never executed. With an introduction by Picasso expert Werner Spies, this volume, published earlier in a German edition to accompany an exhibition shown in Duisburg and Hamburg, reproduces the complete Paris sketchbook and 62 sheets from the Dinard sketchbook. Werner Spies is the author of "Picasso's World of Children", "Max Ernst: A Retrospective" and "Fernando Botero: Paintings and Drawings".
