“AMONG THE FINEST, BOLDEST, MOST POIGNANTLY HUMAN OF ALL HE HAS PRODUCED”: PICASSO’S DRAWINGS, 1959 EDITION
PICASSO, Pablo. Pablo Picasso Dessins. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, (1959). Tall quarto, original white illustrated silk, original die-cut dust jacket, original acetate wrapper.
First edition of this visual chronology of Picasso’s stylistic development through his drawings, profusely illustrated.
“To say that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace” (Robert Hughes). From 1948 to 1955 Picasso lived in Vallauris with Françoise Gilot and their two children. During the two months from December 1953 to January 1954, he produced a spate of wonderful drawings, “which rank among the finest, boldest, most poignantly human of all he has produced in the course of his long and brilliant career… They form an organic whole, born of a surging uprush of the creative spirit” (Tériade). In 1956, Maurice Jardot, director of French National Historic Monuments and later of the Galerie Louise Leiris, wrote an introduction to the exhibition catalogue Picasso Dessins d’un Demi-Siecle, in which he compared Picasso’s drawings with Matisse’s— with the former, he wrote, it is “an ardent rush forward’; with the latter, an aim for “if not complete perfection, at least full accomplishment.” In this 1959 collection of Picasso’s drawings, Jardot observes that “Picasso’s work appears as a diagram of great sensibility, in which are inscribed successive liaisons, family events, residences, indeed even stopover places.” Text in French. Freitag 9612.
Only light marginal soiling to original dust jacket. A near-fine copy.