A Day with Picasso (Hardcover)

by Billy Kluver (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
During the 1980s, Swedish-born Billy Klüver became a sort of amateur archivist, collecting early-20th-century photographs of the bohemian district of Paris known as Montparnasse. One day he stumbled upon a group of astonishing photographs depicting such seminal modernist figures as Modigliani; Picasso; his friend, the poet Max Jacob; and the poet and critic André Salmon as well as Picasso's mistress, P`querette. Like an archaeologist reconstructing an artifact, Klüver set about trying to determine how, where, and why the pictures were taken. The result of his efforts is the whimsical and engaging A Day with Picasso, centering around 24 pictures taken on the afternoon of August 12, 1916, over the course of four hours. The photographer? None other than Jean Cocteau, in an early experiment that perhaps prefigured his later films. Brought together by an exhibit at the Salon d'Antin, the famous subjects are shown laughing and clowning their way through a café lunch and later adjourning to a nearby restaurant.

A Day with Picasso also contains a detailed précis of Cocteau's work, some contextual background about the subjects and their relationships to one another, and some sample drawings from the artists whose relaxed camaraderie is so vividly captured in these intriguing photographs.

Review
"Klüver has brought off an astonishing feat. He has recreated an afternoon in Montparnasse so vividly and exhaustively that he has succeeded in illuminating a whole period of the artist's life and clarified key relationships. Thanks to his ability to apply scientific research and imaginative sensibility to iconographical problems, Klver is doing for twentieth-century art historians what Baedeker did for nineteenth-century travelers."
—John Richardson, author of A Life of Picasso

This very amusing and almost wildly ingenious little book is the true story in pictures of what happened to a group of friends in Paris during a four-hour period on Saturday, Aug. 12, 1916, when World War I was almost two years in progress.... We were not there? No, but this is the next best thing. -- The New York Times Book Review, Rosamond Bernier

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 109 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (September 19, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262112280
• ISBN-13: 978-0262112284
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,760,832 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sunny Paris Afternoon with Picasso, Cocteau & Friends, February 18, 2006

By	C. T. Northrup (New York City, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If you ever wanted to travel back in time and grab a bite and spend the day with Picasso, Cocteau, Modigliani et al., then this is probably the closest you'll ever get. Kluver's book is kind of a miracle, little gem, really. Who would have thought that one day in the life of a group of friends could be so interesting (albeit a very important group of friends). Perhaps they never thought about that day, or those photographs again. The book not only successfully outlines the day itself, but the whole context for the day. What was going on with whom, how so and so knew the other, what important gallery shows were coming at the time, etc.

The story also illustrates the marriage of Cocteau's bourgeous/fashion/aristocratic circles with the Montparnasse/Left bank artists...Picasso and Cocteau remained lifelong (though sometimes strained) friends, and this was during the early years of that relationship. The context of the story also brings in couturier of the day Paul Poiret (his home(!!) and adjacent gallery), and patroness Misia Sert, both of whom I loved learning more about after reading this book (Arthur Gold's Misia Sert is a GREAT read). Be sure to read the Notes when you read this book, they hold lots of great little nuggets of information, testament to Kluvers copious and detailed research.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Snapshot of the artist as a boulevardier, December 16, 2000

By	The Sanity Inspector (USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: A Day with Picasso (Paperback)

Long ago, in a city far, far away, Pablo Picasso and some Montparnasse artist colony friends went cafe-hopping. The future film director Jean Cocteau, on leave from the Western Front, snapped pictures of the group indoors and out. Time passed, the friends went their separate ways, and the pictures were dispersed into different hands. Three-quarters of a century later, a Swiss electrical engineer collecting photos of the Montparnasse scene discovered that several of the photos seemed to have been taken at the same time. This book is the story of how he discovered other photos in the series in different collections around the world, how he discovered the identity of the photographer, and how he pinpointed the day and time the pictures were taken.

This is an amazing book, as much for the ten-plus years it took to sleuth this story out as for the fact that anyone did it at all. The author, once he went to extraordinary lengths to collect these photos, even consulted the French Bureau of Longitudes to analyze the shadows in the pictures, in order to fix the time of day.

So, what do we have? Pictures of Picasso as a man in his mid-thirties (with a full head of hair!), in cafes and on the street with other artists, notably Modigliani and Kisling, and his then current amour, and other acquaintances. They cheerfully pose and mug for their friend Cocteau. And that's it, really. The text relates the story of how these photos were taken, and how the author discovered when, where, and by whom they were taken.

As if that wasn't impressive enough, he then adds chapters which deduce what kind of camera Cocteau used, maps of the area with the camera angles plotted, and selections of drawings, diaries, and correspondence that illustrate one detail or other of the pictures. It's all very interesting, in a headache-inducing way--rather like contemplating a picture painted on a grain of rice. And all this for the sake of recovering a long-ago afternoon of bar-hopping! _Le recouvrement du temp perdu_, indeed.

5.0 out of 5 stars A excellent book on the artists early life ., November 1, 1998

By A Customer

I havent ever seen a book like this before. Reading this book and following the complete pictures is the next best thing to having a time machine.This book answers those questions that we never had answered like how was he with his friends? etc. You will enjoy it.