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O'BRIAN**, PATRICK [pseud Richard Patrick Russ]: : Pablo Ruiz Picasso: A Biography

LONDON.COLLINS,1976.

ISBN 0002116855.

UK,8vo HB+protected dw/dj,1st edn. NFINE/NFINE.No owner inscrptn and no price-clip to dw/dj.Subject,b/w portrait photograph to upper wrap; with negligible shelf-wear to edges,due to protected dw/dj; negligible creasing - if any - and no nicks or tears.Top edge slightly dust-soiled and lightly aged with fore- edges lightly aged and thumbed too,though contents are bright,tight and very clean. Dw/dj spine/backstrip not sunned or faded. Bright and clean red paper-covered bds with bright,crisp,stamped silver gilt letters to spine/backstrip and clean,plain white eps.UK,8vo HB+dw/dj,1st edn,11-511pp [paginated] includes half-title+title pages,illustrations list,preface,22 chapters,8pp b/w contemporary photographs, appendices(5) and an index. "Both as a biography and a study of Picasso I believe this to be the fullest that I have come across." - Xavier de Salas,Director of the Prado. This is the first complete life to appear in English of the most famous painter of the 20thC, indeed one of the most famous in the history of European art.No other artist has,in his lifetime,had the most celebrated masterpieces of the Louvre moved out to make room for an exhibition of his own work.Everything about him, except his physical stature,was on an enormous scale.No painter of the first rank has been so awe-inspiringly productive - fifteen thousand oil paintings to say nothing of lithographs, etchings,drawings,ceramics,ballet designs, book illustration and much else. No painter of any rank had made so much money.A few painters have rivalled his life-span of ninety years but none have attracted so avid,so insatiable,a public interest.Yet,as Patrick O'Brian shows in this masterly biography,Picasso was a very private person.Even his wives,his children,his mistresses and his closest friends disagree strongly not only about what he was like but about what he thought and felt.The author was sufficiently acquainted with him to have a strong sense of his personality,but he was not so near as to lose his objective view.Besides a lifetime's gratitude and admiration for the painter's work he is equipped with a first-hand knowledge of the life of the north western Mediterranean in which Picasso was bred and with a rare familiarity with the language and culture, Spanish,French and Catalan,in which he was rooted.It is characteristic of his perceptions that he traces one source of Picasso's secretiveness and deviousness to the rules of self-preservation learned the hard way under the savagely repressive regime of late nineteenth century Spain. The man that emerges from this scholarly, passionate,brilliantly written study is one of many contradictions.Hard and tender,mean and generous,affectionate and cold: in his later years he professed communism and at all stages identified himself with advanced and radical opinion, yet he was profoundly superstitious and retained,in his biographer's view,to the end of his life a residually Catholic mentality.Not that such matters were allowed to interfere with his vigorous sensuality.Sex and money,eating and drinking,friends and quarrels,comedies and tragedies,suicides and wars tumble over each other in the vast chaos of his experience,a chaos reproduced to the despair of his immediate circle in studio after studio,house after house,since the Master forbade absolutely that anything ever should be put in order,dusted or thrown away.Through and behind it all looms the subject of this biography, distilling even on paper a sense of power, of challenge,like one of the bulls that he watched with such pleasure from childhood to old age.Much though he desired solitude Picasso's life was rarely solitary.His fellow painters Braque, Matisse, Derain, the Douanier Roussseau, poets and men of letters, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau, Louis Aragon, Andre Malraux,dealers and connoisseurs, mistresses and hangers-on crowd the pages of this book as they crowded his life.No less present to his mind were the long idylls of the Mediterranean. Please contact seller,because of the value of this item,for correct,insured shipping/P+p quotes - particularly ALL overseas buyers - BEFORE ordering through the order page!

UK,8vo HB+protected dw/dj,1st edn.
Not SIGNED.

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