Amazon.co.uk Review
Picasso's reputation has ensured that the defining points in his artistic development, from the Blue Period to the late works, have been exhaustively covered by art and biographers alike. However, his output from the late 1930s and through the occupation of Paris has received surprisingly little attention. Steven Nash's excellent new collection,
Picasso and the War Years, 1937-1945 admirably fills this gap in Picasso's career.
The collection reassesses both Picasso's life and his artistic output during these critical years. Contributions include discussions of Picasso's wartime writings, his horror at the effects of aerial bombardment, his anguished portraits of women, and the increasingly political nature of his work. Paintings of the stature of Weeping Woman, the enigmatic Night Fishing at Antibes, and the later still lifes are re-evaluated in the light of Picasso's troubled and ambivalent response to war and occupation, and virtually the entire wartime oeuvre is beautifully reproduced in 83 sumptuous colour illustrations.
Following the liberation of Paris in 1944, Picasso told an American reporter: "I have not painted the war because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict. But I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings ... Later on perhaps the historians will find them and show that my style has changed under the war's influence." Picasso and the War Years uncannily fulfils Picasso's prophecy, which stands as an important book not just on Picasso but on the wider impact which war has upon art. --Jerry Brotton
Synopsis
This volume draws upon new research and works that, in some cases, were held out of public view in Picasso's own collection to explore the period of his life from the Spanish Civil War through World War II and the Nazi occupation of France. Between these years Picasso produced some of the most intensely personal and expressive work of his career. With the outbreak of the Civil War in Spain, political crisis became personal crisis and the formerly autobiographical, even hermetic outlook in Picasso's art expanded to embrace a new political and social consciousness. He responded first to the horrors of war and then to the dangers and privations of life in occupied Paris, where he chose to remain until the liberation. The book traces the artist's responses to war as manifested in figure paintings, still lifes, portraits and cityscapes, amplified by photographs, letters, manuscripts and illustrated books by the artist, drawn from all around the world. At a time when many artists internationally are looking for languages to express social and political criticism, it is more relevant than ever to consider the interplay between art and history in Picasso's work. m
