| ||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Dore Ashton's books include A Joseph Cornell Album, Picasso on Art, A Critical Study of Philip Guston, A Fable of Modern Art, The New York School, Noguchi East and West, and A Reading of Modern Art. She lives in New York City.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Engaging,
By
This review is from: Picasso On Art (Da Capo Paperback) (Paperback)
An engaging, if not wholly cohesive, account of Picasso's sayoing and writings about art, but more. The strength of the book comes when he speaks on art. The ancilliary issues that come up serve to round out the figure of Picasso more, but may not quite be the art treatise you're looking for.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Understanding art,
By Adiatha (New York City) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Picasso On Art (Da Capo Paperback) (Paperback)
"Everyone wants to understand art," reflects Picasso early in this book. "Why not try to understand the songs of a bird?" It is a playful observation, and one that can only emanate, we imagine, from the mind of an artist throughly engaged with the material on palette. Picasso's witty comparison suggests art's elusive form and implies a truism which the reader will discover to be a driving force throughout these pages: The audience to a work of art, like its creator, succeeds by embracing rather than understanding the rendered object.
It is the artist's full embrace which resolves itself into an all-encompassing vision, the very contradictions inherent in that panoramic view requiring for their complete rendition an array of angled planes that can only be created by the shattering of constructive materials. Hence arises that formal abstraction that so often mystifies those who seek understanding through simple assertion. How many individuals, indeed, feel that certain works by Picasso misrepresent rather than render the real? "We all know that Art is not truth," muses Picasso in acknowledgment of this confusion. "Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand." The truth that is so realized, adds Picasso, is something different from the artist's original vision, for the truly rendered subject, in a paradox, evaporates. Picasso recalls an effort to paint the portraits of two people; by the time his work was done his subjects existed no longer. In the artist's words: "The `vision' of them gave me a preliminary emotion; then little by little their actual presences became blurred; they developed into a fiction and then disappeared altogether, or rather they were transformed into all kinds of problems. They are no longer two people, you see, but forms and colors: forms and colors that have taken on, meanwhile, the idea of two people and preserve the vibrations of their life." So Picasso's human beings become real by disappearing from view, just as Isabel Archer becomes fully realized by vanishing at the conclusion of Henry James's novel. Art reveals truth by lying. Subjects become realized by disappearing. Any reader witness to this book's magical paradoxes, arising as they do from that hidden place where the creative flint strikes steel, can only view Picasso's observations as lending to our vision of artistic discourse a rich chiaroscuro. We cannot say this book will deepen the reader's understanding of art, unless by that understanding one means an embrace of the imaginative machine's secret pistons.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Absolutely Entertaining,
By E Camille "EC" (New York City) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Picasso On Art (Da Capo Paperback) (Paperback)
Picasso is quite a personality and that comes through in this book. I would recommend reading this book along with Gertrude Stein's book on him.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Inside This Book
(learn more)
First Sentence:
I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Del Pomar, Gertrude Stein, New York, Picasso Explains, Les Demoiselles, Communist Party, Notre Dame de Vie February, Picture Not Settled Beforehand, Prado Museum New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Del Pomar, Gertrude Stein, New York, Picasso Explains, Les Demoiselles, Communist Party, Notre Dame de Vie February, Picture Not Settled Beforehand, Prado Museum New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 24
books:
See all 24 books this book cites
49
books
cite this book:
See all 49 books citing this book
- Pablo Picasso by Paul Eluard on 4 pages
- Life with Picasso by Francoise Gilot in Front Matter, and Back Matter
- Writings on Art by Mark Rothko in Back Matter
- New Life by Dorothy Martin in Back Matter
- Paul Gauguin (Artists in Their Time) by Robert Anderson in Back Matter
See all 24 books this book cites
- Pablo Picasso (Reaktion Books - Critical Lives) by Mary Ann Caws on 6 pages
- Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon by Gijs van Hensbergen on 4 pages
- Psychostrategies of Avant-Garde Art by Donald Kuspit in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
- The Artist's Mentor: Inspiration from the World's Most Creative Minds by Ian Jackman on page 226, and page 229
- Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture) by Charles Altieri on page 202, and Back Matter
See all 49 books citing this book
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
