Picasso: A Biography

by PatrickO'Brian (Author), Patrick O’Brian (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2010

  $4.35

  A scholarly, passionate and brilliantly-written biography of Pablo Picasso by Patrick O'Brian, the famous author of the much-loved Aubrey-Maturin series, reissued in a stunning new cover.

  Patrick O'Brian's outstanding biography of Picasso explores comprehensively the life of this awe-inspiring artist. Enormously productive and hugely successful, Picasso continues to attract avid, insatiable public interest. O'Brian was a close friend and a neighbour of Picasso's, and the book reflects the closeness of their friendship and the immense erudition and warm wit of Patrick O'Brian.

  The man that emerges from the pages is full of contradictions: hard yet tender, mean yet generous, affectionate but cold, professing communism but retaining an essentially Catholic mentality, private despite his relish of fame. Critically, O'Brian's is the only biography to fully appreciate the distinctly Mediterranean origins of Picasso's character and art.

  Sex and money, eating and drinking, friends and quarrels, comedies and tragedies, suicides and wars tumble over each other in the vast chaos of Picasso's experience, He was `a man almost as lonely as the sun, but one who glowed with much the same fierce, burning life.'

• Used

  Paperback
  1994

  $3.36

  Everything about Picasso, except his physical stature, was on an enormous scale. His appetite for sex, money, eating and drinking, friends and quarrels, comedy and tragedy, are legendary. An awe-inspiringly productive painter, he also made a large amount of money during his life. A few painters have rivalled his life-span of 90 years, but none has attracted so insatiable a public interest. This biography gives full weight to the distinctly Mediterranean origins of Picasso's character and art. The man that emerges from it is one of many contradictions: hard and tender, mean and generous, affectionate and cold, private despite his relish of fame. A man who, despite the professed communism of his later years, in the author's view retained to the end of his life a residual Catholic mentality.