Books, Arts & Manners: Christmas Ink

Again the annual crop of art books is here—luxurious, lavish, crazily expensive, products of years of drudgery and sweat on the part of their authors and editors. It seems almost immoral to present them to NR readers as if they were so many variants on toothpaste or food-processors; goodness knows they deserve better. But short mentions, publishers tell me, are better than none, and art books tend to be ignored except by the big, glossy magazines. So here goes, with the caveat that this selection is nothing if not personal and idiosyncratic.

This year’s winner of the coffee-table sweepstakes has to be Picasso—The Early Years by Josep Palau i Fabre (Rizzoli, $160), which weighs in at l11/2 pounds, with 560 pages and 1,587 illustrations, one-third of them in color. But this is not just one more hefty Picasso tome, for its author, who is thoroughly acquainted with the artist’s life, introduces us to a figure who may be new even to connoisseurs, one whose-precocity rivaled Mozart’s. Starting in 1895, as a 13-year-old, Picasso almost literally replicated the history of painting over the previous forty years, beginning with Realism and ending with Symbolism and Art Nouveau, a progression which Palau i Fabre traces in minute but absorbing detail. The book ends where many books on Picasso begin, with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the seminal creation of 1907, which, in a single gesture, ruptured the age-old tradition which treated the surface of a painting as “a window on the visible world” (the phrase is Panofsky’s). In so doing, Picasso made possible the birth of non-objective art, though he himself never abandoned reality. His roots in Castile and Catalonia, as Palau i Fabre makes clear, went far too deep for him ever to have done that.

RB

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Ruth Berenson

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Again the annual crop of art books is here—luxurious, lavish, crazily expensive, products of years of drudgery and sweat on the part of their authors and editors. It seems almost immoral to present them to NR readers as if they were so many variants on toothpaste or food-processors; goodness knows they deserve better. But short mentions, publishers tell me, are better than none, and art books tend to be ignored except by the big, glossy magazines. So here goes, with the caveat that this selection is nothing if not personal and idiosyncratic.

This year’s winner of the coffee-table sweepstakes has to be Picasso—The Early Years by Josep Palau i Fabre (Rizzoli, $160), which weighs in at l11/2 pounds, with 560 pages and 1,587 illustrations, one-third of them in color. But this is not just one more hefty Picasso tome, for its author, who is thoroughly acquainted with the artist’s life, introduces us to a figure who may be new even to connoisseurs, one whose-precocity rivaled Mozart’s. Starting in 1895, as a 13-year-old, Picasso almost literally replicated the history of painting over the previous forty years, beginning with Realism and ending with Symbolism and Art Nouveau, a progression which Palau i Fabre traces in minute but absorbing detail. The book ends where many books on Picasso begin, with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the seminal creation of 1907, which, in a single gesture, ruptured the age-old tradition which treated the surface of a painting as “a window on the visible world” (the phrase is Panofsky’s). In so doing, Picasso made possible the birth of non-objective art, though he himself never abandoned reality. His roots in Castile and Catalonia, as Palau i Fabre makes clear, went far too deep for him ever to have done that.