Francoise Gilot was a young painter in Pasis when she first met Picasso - he was sixty-two and she was twenty-one. During the following ten years they were lovers, worked closely together and she became mother to two of his children, Claude and Paloma. LIFE WITH PICASSO, her account of those extraordinary years, is filled with intimate and astonishing revelations about the man, his work, his thoughts and his friends - Matisse, Braque, Gertrude Stein and Giacometti among others. Francois Gilot paints a compelling portrait of her turbulent life with the temperamental genius that was Picasso. She is a superb witness to Picasso as an artist and to his views on art...

This two-volume set features gold blocking and fine endpapers. It is gilt edged and bound in leather and silky rayon.

Diego in detail: The most comprehensive study of Rivera's work ever made A veritable folk hero in Latin America and Mexico's most important artist - along with his wife, painter Frida Kahlo - Diego Rivera (1886-1957) led a passionate life devoted to art and communism. After spending the 1910s in Europe, where he surrounded himself with other artists and embraced the Cubist movement, he returned to Mexico and began to paint the large-scale murals for which he is most famous. In his murals, he addressed social and political issues relating to the working class, earning him prophetic status among the peasants of Mexico. He was invited to create works abroad, most notably in the United States, where he stirred up controversy by depicting Lenin in his mural for the Rockefeller Center in New York City (the mural was destroyed before it was finished). Rivera's most remarkable work is his 1932 Detroit Industry, a group of 27 frescos at the Detroit Institute of Art in Michigan.

Fiercely competitive, Matisse and Picasso engaged in one of the most formidable artistic dialogs of this century. In Matisse and Picasso, Yve-Alain Bois stages the intertwined evolution of the two giants of modern art as though it were an ongoing game of chess between two masters. After an overview of the extraordinarily powerful dialog between the two artists during the first part of their careers, Bois concentrates on the unique partnership as it developed from the early 1930s on, at the time when the two artists, who had been very distant from each other for more than a decade, renewed their interchange. As Joachim Pissarro points out in the foreword of this volume, Matisse and Picasso's dense plot and rich narrative make this work read more like a suspense novel than a traditional art history treatise. Bois' thoroughly researched historical demonstration is supported by striking visual juxtapositions of works by the two artists brought together here for the first time, making this long-awaited study a major contribution to the history of twentieth-century art. This book is published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. 275 illustrations

Covers in one volume all the periods of Picasso's long, incredibly versatile career, with exquisite reproductions of nearly every significant work he ever created.

Georges Braque is one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century, yet only a small part of his work is well known. This handsome book sheds new light on the art of this master and shifts the focus from his Cubist work to the great cycles of his mature years -- the Interiors, Billiard Tables, Studios, and late Bird paintings.In Braque's later work, says John Golding, we see that he is able to demonstrate an increased freedom and poetic quality even while remaining truthful to the principles of Cubism. As in his Cubist still lifes, Braque regards the objects in his interiors in a detached manner, using them to define the spatial organization of the paintings, and he treats the figures that occasionally appear in these works in a similar way, totally fusing them with their setting. The artist's palette of darker tones also harks back to the Cubist years. But in the series of Billiard Tables, which dates from 1944 to 1949, Braque manipulates space with unusual boldness, using the table as a device with which to play visual tricks. And the later works also exhibit a poetic content, especially evident in the Bird paintings, with their quiet resonance and with space depicted without formal limits and defined only by the presence of the bird itself.This book will serve as the catalogue of an exhibition of Braque's late works at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in spring 1997 and at the Menil Collection, Houston, in summer 1997.

A scholarly, passionate and brilliantly-written biography of Pablo Picasso by Patrick O'Brian, the famous author of the much-loved Aubrey-Maturin series, reissued in a stunning new cover. Patrick O'Brian's outstanding biography of Picasso explores comprehensively the life of this awe-inspiring artist. Enormously productive and hugely successful, Picasso continues to attract avid, insatiable public interest. O'Brian was a close friend and a neighbour of Picasso's, and the book reflects the closeness of their friendship and the immense erudition and warm wit of Patrick O'Brian. The man that emerges from the pages is full of contradictions: hard yet tender, mean yet generous, affectionate but cold, professing communism but retaining an essentially Catholic mentality, private despite his relish of fame. Critically, O'Brian's is the only biography to fully appreciate the distinctly Mediterranean origins of Picasso's character and art. Sex and money, eating and drinking, friends and quarrels, comedies and tragedies, suicides and wars tumble over each other in the vast chaos of Picasso's experience, He was 'a man almost as lonely as the sun, but one who glowed with much the same fierce, burning life.'

   At the height of his powers, Pablo Picasso was the artist as revolutionary, breaking through the niceties of form in order to mount a direct challenge to the values of his time. At the height of his fame, he was the artist as royalty: incalculably wealthy, universally idolized−and wholly isolated.   In this stunning critical assessment, John Berger−one of this century's most insightful cultural historians−trains his penetrating gaze upon this most prodigious and enigmatic painter and on the Spanish landscape and very particular culture that shpaed his life and work. Writing with a novelist's sensuous evocation of character and detail, and drawing on an erudition that embraces history, politics, and art, Berger follows Picasso from his childhood in Malaga to the Blue Period and Cubism, from the creation of Guernica to the pained etchings of his final years. He gives us the full measure of Picasso's triumphs and an unsparing reckoning of their cost−in exile, in loneliness, and in a desolation that drove him, in his last works, into an old man's furious and desperate frenzy at the beauty of what he could no longer create.

Powerfully capturing his charismatic magnetism and obsessive passion, Picasso is the most intimate portrait ever of the man whose life and work are a personification of this tumultuous century. To be a six-hour ABC miniseries from the producer of Roots and The Thorn Birds. 32 pages of photos.

Picasso and Braque offers an intimate look at one of the most pivotal exchanges in the history of Western art: the culminating two years (1910-12) of Analytic Cubism. While the Cubist experiment has long been a requisite chapter in the history of modernism, this is the first publication to delve deeply into these two intense years of productivity, revealing the intriguing pictorial game being played out between these two great masters.Essays by prominent curators and historians offer sustained readings of paintings, drawings, and prints in terms of their engagement with issues of genre, format, medium, and artistic process. In addition, the new technology of spectral imaging provides reproductions of astounding color and textural fidelity, making this an essential publication for those seeking to understand better the complexity of Picasso's and Braque's mark-making, which typically evades conventional photography.