cover image Picasso: Life and Art

Picasso: Life and Art

Pierre Daix. Icon Editions, $30 (450pp) ISBN 978-0-06-430976-9

Daix knew Picasso well for a quarter-century and has written two major Picasso catalogues. In this illuminating, thorough critical biography first published in France in 1986 and now updated, Picasso springs to life as actor, witness and didactic explorer of the convulsions of the 20th century. Daix sets the Spanish artist firmly in the context of his circle in France where cross-fertilization of ideas with Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Cocteau, Breton and Gertrude Stein led Picasso to a Faustian view that art must surpass itself and wrest meaning from life. Daix claims Picasso as a forerunner and pioneer of surrealism who used surrealist technique for his own ends-- probing the unconscious. Illustrated with 24 pages of photographs and artworks, this study unravels the creative process in an ``explorer of women'' who loved them for the new dimensions of imagination they unlocked. (Jan.)