Picasso’s books fifty years on
Much continues to be written about Picasso fifty years after his death. The narratives have changed, literary genres are broader in scope, and readers are more diverse too. Now we can read non-fiction novels about his life, stories about the men and women who lived in the painter’s shadow and, of course, new academic research and contributions to the study of his long life and extensive oeuvre.
Not only images but also words have played a key role in the year of the Picasso Celebration 1973–2023, an international programme featuring more than fifty exhibitions and events held in cultural institutions of Europe and North America. And it is precisely the context of these commemorations which has stepped up related editorial production and spurred the publishing, editing and revising of many books on Pablo Picasso written from very different approaches, prominent among which are the following:
THE BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH
Descriptions, recreations and accounts of episodes in Picasso’s life are presented in several books published in 2022 and 2023 with three particular features: journalistic language, thorough documentation and documented fiction. These three cases furthermore highlight a trend that has taken on a key role in cultural and social studies over the past years: the adoption of a gynocentric perspective.
Two books have been published in French on the relationship between Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: Sa vie pour Picasso: Marie-Thérèse Walter (Stock, 2022) and Marie-Thérèse Walter & Pablo Picasso: Biographie d’une relation (Nouvelles éditions Scala, 2022). The first, by French journalist and writer Brigitte Benkemoun, has 150 pages, and the second, by art curator Laurence Madeleine, more than 600. Both books, written respectively in journalistic and art-historical language, are less centred on Pablo Picasso and instead pay more attention to Marie-Thérèse.
Two publications belong to the docufiction genre (‘non-fiction novel’ or ‘fiction based on real events’, as their authors describe them). They are Las traiciones de Picasso (Turner, 2022) by José María Beneyto, and Las mujeres detrás de Picasso (Lunwerg, 2023) by art historian, communicator and activist Eugenia Tenenbaum. These publications fall halfway between the truthfulness of documentary and the imagination of literary creativity, and are undoubtedly a genre highly representative of the present day.
THE POLITICAL APPROACH
There are also many publications that link the artist to political contexts not only throughout his lifetime but also after his death in 1973. It should be remembered that Pablo Picasso lived to be 91 – nine decades that witnessed significant historical events, such as two world wars and the Spanish Civil War.
In Picasso con los exiliados (Muñeca Infinita, 2023), which spans just over 150 pages, activist and anarchist writer Mercedes Guillén, the co-founder of Mujeres Libres, tells of her friendship with the artist and how he helped Republican exiles in Paris. This human and everyday account provides very valuable firsthand information about the life of Spanish exiles in France.
The Spanish translation of Anne Cohen-Solal’s book, Un extranjero llamado Picasso (Paidós, 2023), is more extensive. It reveals the tensions Picasso experienced when he first arrived in Paris. According to the author, this situation, which he endured until leaving the French capital in 1955, stemmed from the triple stigma of being a foreigner, a radical ideologist and an avant-garde artist.
PICASSO’S WORDS
Amid this sea of interpretative literature, 2023 has also witnessed the publication of two major volumes in Spanish that are a primary source of knowledge about Pablo Picasso. These are Pablo Picasso. Libro de las conversaciones (Cántico, 2023) by Rafael Inglada and Pablo Picasso escritos. 1935–1959 (AKAL, 2023).
The first brings together 130 conversations and interviews – the largest number published to date – many previously unpublished in Spain. The list of sources includes not only periodicals but also TV and radio interviews as well as four imaginary conversations. A notable feature is the index of hundreds of names of people the artist came across during his lifetime, which makes it easier to handle its more than 600 pages.
The second book, Pablo Picasso escritos. 1935–1959 (AKAL, 2023), is the first Spanish edition of Picasso’s writings and has come out 34 years after the French version (Gallimard, 1989). This reference work on Picasso’s literary output starts in 1935, the year the artist began writing poems systematically – before that he had done so occasionally. The difficulty of translating a Picasso who wrote in Spanish, in French and alternating between both languages, is undoubtedly the main reason why that this volume has not been available in Spain until 2023. The book was presented at the session entitled More about Picasso, at the Christine Ruiz-Picasso Auditorium in the Museo Picasso Málaga on October 10, 2023.
THE IMPACT OF PICASSO
Several exhibitions staged in 2023 have been devoted to the impact Picasso’s work has had on other subsequent movements and generations of artists (among them Picasso. sin título, The Echo of Picasso, Sophie Calle. Depende de ti, preciosa and Carmen Calvo), and many publications have also come out on this subject. One is El proyecto Picasso: acróbatas, pantallas, autorretratos (Cátedra, 2023), which its author Estrella de Diego describes as ‘a new look at Picasso’s relationship with cinema and the media’. It is a book of essays that relate Picasso’s work to the universe of Pop Art and popular culture.
This survey ends with Guernica. Pervivencia de un mito (Universidad de Granada, 2023). Edited by José Lebrero Stals and Pepe Karmel, it brings together eleven essays focusing on three themes: the position and reception of Guernica in today’s diversified popular culture; how it is represented in ethical debates; and the tension created by the legacy of its images in the artistic balance between the vernacular and the global.