A fresh, multidisciplinary guide to Picasso's staggering engagement with the human form across painting, sculpture, drawing, engraving and ceramics

Published with Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Amply illustrated, this volume traces Pablo Picasso's (1881–1973) evolving approach to figuration throughout the many stages of his work―from the elongated, hieratic renderings of the Blue and Rose Periods, to the dynamic deconstructions of Cubism, to the colossal fleshy bodies of the 1920s, to the hybrid beings of the Surrealist period and beyond. Yoking masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, the Louvre Abu Dhabi and other institutions, Picasso: The Figure adopts a fresh thematic structure to its subject matter. Its five mythologically inspired sections―"Orion," "Pygmalion," "Minotaur," "Deucalion & Pyrrha" and "The Picasso Canon"―chronologically trace Picasso's figurative innovations across mediums, including painting, sculpture, drawing, engraving and ceramics. Multidisciplinary in approach, the volume features essays not only by leading Picasso scholars but also by historians of the body, anthropologists and prehistorians. Together, the essays dissect the artist's rigorous dialogue with the visual languages of mythology and antiquity from which his modernist representations of the human form emerged.