Picasso

Roland Penrose

3.93 · Rating details · 15 ratings · 3 reviews

A selection of reproductions of Picasso paintings covering his whole career & using text by British artist and biographer of Picasso, Roland Penrose. Additional text by David Lomas.

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Paperback, 128 pages

Published 1971 by Phaidon Press

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Jan 28, 2014 tENTATIVELY, cONVENIENCE rated it liked it

Shelves: art

review of
Roland Penrose's Picasso
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 28, 2014

I picked this up at a friend's yard sale, not that that's likely to matter to you, dear reader, much, for probably less than a dollar. I mention that b/c it's astounding how many things a person can acquire in this surplus society w/o having much money. I like Picasso's paintings, mostly the Cubist stuff. He had a period when he was associated w/ Surrealism too - that never really made that much sense to me: I ki ...more

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Oct 19, 2008 Tim Pendry rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history-of-art, art

The Phaidon Colour Library is a remarkably cheap set of full colour guides to the great artists and to some of the schools of art that make up the canon.

This guide to Picasso (48 pages) is, unfortunately, somewhat hagiographic because the extensive Introduction by his friend, the surrealist painter Roland Penrose, was written in 1971. At this time, Picasso's post-war work was not being widely appreciated by critics (with justification). Simultaneously, the artist was the subject of a highly dev The Phaidon Colour Library is a remarkably cheap set of full colour guides to the great artists and to some of the schools of art that make up the canon.

This guide to Picasso (48 pages) is, unfortunately, somewhat hagiographic because the extensive Introduction by his friend, the surrealist painter Roland Penrose, was written in 1971. At this time, Picasso's post-war work was not being widely appreciated by critics (with justification). Simultaneously, the artist was the subject of a highly developed cultural myth of greatness that owed more to the politics of the Cold War than to any reasoned assesment of the work he was undertaking at the time.

Picasso, by this time. was in the awkward position (he died two years later in 1973) of being lionized by the liberal Left and disregarded by the artistic community except as a historical figure of note. As a result, this guide is good for an account of what Penrose thought of his friend but, to get a more nuanced and reasoned view, you will have to go elsewhere.

The truth is that Picasso was a genius but one whose talent lie in his stylistic adaptability and experimentalism based around a surprisingly few themes fully derived from the mainstream historical tradition of Western art. There is a coldness, facility and even occasional inauthenticity in his work at times as if the artist was a very decent man but not a great man even if he was a great artist.

Perhaps he was most true to himself as an artist, without external worries about the wider world or women, during the remarkable Cubist phase when, in tandem with Braque, he worked a fairly cold-hearted theory through every possible development, from beginning to natural end. He transformed the way art is seen in terms of form even if the hermetic nature of the experiment meant that it was intellectually exhausted by the early 1920s.

The early works look sweet. It is not his fault if they have been degraded by over-use by UNESCO for Christmas cards - the international secular liberal community having adopted him as their patron saint from the 1950s. The last works (when he was over 60 from the late 1940s through to the early 1970s) unfortunately look like repetitive simplistic daubs. I have not yet seen a convincing reason why they should be seen as more than relatively minor works despite every attempt to proselytise for them from Picasso-philes.

So, once the experiment of Cubism is taken for read, why is he great? Because at key junctures, he found a certain authenticity that was not pure intellectualism nor scrabbling around to find a voice in a market.

The first phase of true greatness starts with the discovery of primitivism in sculpture. The remarkably simple and erotic 'Nude Against a Red Background' (1904), 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' (1907), 'Three Women' (1907/1908) and 'The Dryad' (1908) are works that open the space for Cubism but allow sculptural representation on canvas that expresses raw, primal emotion. The irony that his art swings from this to a rigid intellectualism of observation in the Cubist phase is interesting (approx. 1909-1920) but it does not detract from Picasso being the true bridge between Cezanne and abstraction and a master of form.

The second phase comes ultimately from his adoption by the surrealists. The Three Dancers of 1925 is a welcome return to primitivism and the early 1930s see brutalist deconstructions of a classicism that was increasingly being associated with conservative authoritarianism and fascism, alongside primally erotic paintings of his mistress ('Nude Woman in an Armchair' and 'Woman Asleep in an Armchair' (1932). This combination of revolt against convention and interest in expressing primal feeling - much as in the 1904-1908 works - came together in some dramatic works of the late 1930s that have become iconic and the basis of his later position as secular saint.

The politics of this second phase are important. Surrealism gets left behind and we see a series of major works, of which Guernica is the most culturally significant but which also include 'Weeping Woman' and 'Cat Devouring A Bird', in which Picasso responded to the violent collapse of civilisation in the 1930s with a raw power that was to buy him his post-war reputation on the internationalist Left.

Perhaps war exhausted him. He did not scuttle to America. He joined the Communist Party after the war and perhaps it was just easier to leave changing the world to the comrades. He could claim to have done his bit. Similarly, by 1944, he was well over 60 with, perhaps, a more moderated libido.

Still, his achievement from his early 20s to his late 50s is remarkable. He deserves his great status. If only his admirers would leave him alone, it might be better appreciated. Buy the book for the plates - the series is very cheap to own and even an unsatisfactory introduction can be overlooked for this reason.
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Jul 20, 2016 Roberto Roldán rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Un paso emocional por las facetas de Picasso, desde la época azul, época rosa y finalmente El Cubismo cómo personaje estrella de este movimiento. Picasso todo un visionario y hombre de negocios, trabajaba arduamente en espera que la inspiración lo visite y generar su magia.

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