Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> AT THE TIME THIS BOOK OPENS January 1907 Picasso was living with the languorous auburn-haired Fernande Olivier-celebrated as “la belle Fer- nande.” Their affair had started three and a half years earlier and had reached its apogee the previous summer when Picasso had taken her to a remote village in the Pyrenees and painted her as an incandescent god- dess. In the last few months however things had changed. Fernande could only conclude from her lover’s latest work that the honeymoon was over and that Picasso felt far more intensely about his art-to which all the women in his life would ultimately be sacrificed-than he did about her. Now that he was starting work on the revolutionary painting that would come to be called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon the artist found Fernande’s presence extremely distracting but he was too possessive and jealous to let her out. And so while he worked away demonically she was confined to the large chaotically cluttered studio in the Bateau Lavoir-that ramshackle tenement perched precariously on the slopes of the Butte de Montmartre where cubism is said rightly or wrongly to have been born. When he was not painting or more likely drawing the artist relaxed in the company of a tight little group of friends who were already known as “la bande ? Picasso. As he told the writer H?l?ne Parmelin some fifty years later. “We had no other preoccupation but what we were doing and saw nobody but each other. Apollinaire Max Jacob Salmon… Think of it what an aristocracy!” Picasso was right: his bande was as exclusive as disdainful and as much a law unto itself as any aristocratic coterie. They had no doubts about their destiny: You’ve heard of La Fontaine and Moli?re and Racine” Jacob announce Well (MP)