Je Suis Le Cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso

by Picasso Pablo

The Sketchbooks of Picasso is the only collection available of the private sketchbooks of Pablo Picasso, which he began in Barcelona in 1894. For more than seventy years, as the young painter blossomed and matured into the greatest artist of the twentieth century, he kept a record of his ideas and thoughts, so that by 1964 there were 175 sketchbooks, a unique and startling picture of the mind of a genius at work. Accompanying the major sections are essays by six of the greatest American art historians: E.A. Carmean, Sam Hunter, Rosalind Krauss, Theodore Reff, Robert Rosenblum, and Gert Schiff. A foreword by Claude Picasso, the artist's son, and a reminiscence by Francoise Gilot, Claude's mother, provide a more personal understanding of the part the sketchbooks played in Picasso's life.

Genres: Art

349 pages, Paperback

First published November 25, 1996

Reviews

[Lindsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's fine I guess, the chapter intros I read were all in praise of picasso's genius, though as you go on through the sketchbooks there's an increasing number of distorted female figures and rapey doodles. Picasso never meant for these to be seen though, and they were compiled after his death so he didn't even get to curate them himself, so we'll never know which ones he saw as important and which were just silly things he drew to amuse himself.