Customer Reviews

A Sum of Destructions: Picasso's Cultures and the Creation of Cubism

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The organization of this book is striking. Although it starts with Picasso's childhood in Malaga and ends a few years after his arrival in Paris, it's anything but a chronological biography of Picasso's early years. The theme of each chapter is some class of cultural artifacts or fads -- mainly from popular culture -- that influenced Picasso in the years through his Cubist period. As a result, the narrative skips around while also having a general sense of forward motion: very appropriately, a Cubist sense of time.

The range of things described is incredibly broad. It includes popular religious objects, newspaper ads, academic history painting, fads for Esperanto and similar artifical languages, "the language of parasols" (which Spanish ladies learned from color trading cards enclosed in packages of chocolates), and numerous sorts of tchotchkes. I especially enjoyed looking at some of Picasso's guitar sculptures in the light of the paper cut-and-fold-up models that were popular when he was a child.

All of this cultural material is fascinating. Still, I wasn't always convinced of strong connections between some items and Picasso's paintings, especially in the first couple of chapters. It seemed to me that there might be alternative explanations for some features of his paintings, or at least that the case presented was occasionally a bit sketchy.

Nonetheless, the last several chapters are a great tour de force. Among the highlights are analyses of some of Picasso's collages. The bits of newspaper that Picasso used, and where he chose to snip them, weren't at all chosen at random. What's especially interesting is that some of them were chosen because of the stories or ads adjacent to, or on the reverse of, the cuttings he used, even though these aren't visible in the artwork.

The scholarship necessary to track down all these connections is mind-boggling. It's easy to understand why this book was more than 20 years in the making. The writing style, though isn't at all academic --and at times is quite earthy in ways I'm sure Picasso would have approved.

I was also impressed by the book's compassionate treatment (appropriately and unavoidably mixed with some bathos) of Picasso's father, a failed academic painter whose specialty was realistic paintings of pigeons. Most of all, the book is a great confirmation of Picasso's fundamentally comic sensibility. That makes the book a pleasure to read all the way through.

As impossible as it seems to say something new about Picasso, Staller manages not only that, but to summon up the entire ethos that surrounded and created him. An astonishing and beautiful book.

Dr. Staller combined resolute scholarship with poetic exposition. She produced an astonishing enlargement of Picasso's "world of veils and fragments."

A marvelous book that is equally beautiful and well-written.

The fact that Picasso was an ANARCHIST, and a pacifist is completely missed.
Considering Picasso claimed Barcelona (an anarchist stronghold) as his home town, and he was the founding editor of a strongly outspoken anarchist and separatist journal when he was barely out of his teens, this is a pretty big miss.

For a good resource that does cover Picasso's obvious Kropotkinesque anarchism, try Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897-1914