Recommendations from our site
From his earliest creative years, Picasso’s circle reads like a pantheon of 20th century artistic greats. Anecdotes from his life could fill entire book tomes, and indeed, John Richardson’s magisterial biography runs to four volumes, and ends with World War II (Picasso died in 1973.) “As I get older and older, I get more and more astonished the deeper I get into his work,” Richardson said of his friend in 2012. His is the definitive biography, and although volume four is still pending publication, the place to start if you have the time and the inclination.
Our most recommended books
-
Ways of Seeing
by John Berger -
The Lives of the Artists
by Giorgio Vasari -
The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art
by Joseph Leo Koerner -
Camera Lucida
by Roland Barthes -
The Life of John Ruskin
by W. G. Collingwood -
Views of Albion: The Reception of British Art and Design in Central Europe, 1890 –1918
by Andrzej Szczerski
