Picasso / Lautrec

04/01/2018

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) would seem to have been analysed from every possible perspective and in every possible way. Nevertheless, that enormous trove of information does not absolve us from exploring many other complementary points of view with a more focused scope and range. This is precisely the idea with Picasso/Lautrec, the first comprehensive analysis that examines the relationship between the Spanish artist and the Frenchman Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901). Toulouse-Lautrec had a decisive influence on the next generation of artists and his artistic achievements stimulated, above all, Picasso. Lautrec, who was born seventeen years before Picasso, was a decisive figure for the Spaniard, right at the cusp of the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. In this regard, the young Picasso of fin-de-siècle Barcelona had already come into contact with a more mature group of Catalan painters who were familiar with the work of Lautrec.
Though Toulouse-Lautrec died prematurely the period during which their careers overlapped between 1899 and 1901, when the death of the former marked the beginnings of the latter’s international success, both artists were retrospectively concerned with the same question of linearity and planarity whose source was Ingres. Picasso/Lautrec limits itself fundamentally to that encounter between the prematurely mature Toulouse-Lautrec and the young Picasso when he was still in Barcelona just before moving to Paris (1899) and once he had definitively settled in that city (1904) —without disregarding some of those antecedent or concurrent examples cited above. Nor will it, in principle, disregard the persistence of such influences on Picasso much later in his career, though they may subsequently have left only nominal traces in his work.

Publisher: THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA MUSEUM. 2017. 23×27,5 cm. Pages: 240.
English Hardcover Edition. ISBN: 9788417173050. RRP:€ 46,80
Spanish Hardcover Edition. ISBN: 9788417173074. RRP:€ 46,80
Spanish Softcover Edition. ISBN: 9788417173067. RRP:€ 40,80