Correspondence

Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein

Translated by Lorna Scott Fox

Edited by Laurence Madeline

 

7.5 x 9 inches, 320pp, 63 halftones. November 2008

ISBN : 9781905422913

Rs  850.00 (HB)
$29.95 (HB)
£20.50 (HB)

Buy (HB)

Pablo Picasso was one of the most prodigious and revolutionary artists in the history of Western painting. Gertrude Stein was an avant-garde American writer, art collector, eccentric and self-styled genius. Her Paris home was the leading salon for artists and writers between the Wars. Picasso painted Stein’s portrait and they became firm friends.

 

Their correspondence extends across a time of extraordinary social and political change, between 1906 and 1944, effectively from the Belle Epoque to the German Occupation of the Second World War. Both wrote in French—a language neither ever entirely mastered.

 

Written as letters, cards and scribbled notes, their intimate correspondence touches lightly on both the weighty and the everyday—holidays, money, dinner invitations, art, family, lovers, travel arrangements, how work goes, or the war.

 

The correspondence has been carefully edited and is presented by period, with each introduced with an outline of significant personal and historical events of the time. Explanatory notes to the letters are also included. The volume also features photographs, facsimiles of postcards and letters as well as sketches, drawings and paintings by Picasso.

 

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) is the colossus of 20th Century art, legendary for his gargantuan capacities for both consuming life and producing art.

 

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was an art critic, one of the first collectors of Cubism, and author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933).

 

Laurence Madeline is curator of the Musée Picasso in Paris and custodian of the Picasso Archives. She has curated the exhibitions On set ce sue l\'on garde: Les archives de Picasso (2003) and Picasso Ingers (2004). Her books include Ultra sauvage: Gaugin sculpteur (2001) and, as editor, Dali, Letters à Picasso, 1927-1970 (2005). 

 

Lorna Scott Fox is a journalist, critic and translator presently living in London after 18 years in Mexico and Spain, where she wrote for the local press and produced art catalogue essays, while regularly contributing to the London Review of Books. Her translations from French include Vincent Descombes, Objects of All Sorts (1986; with Jeremy Harding) and her translations from Spanish include Olivier Debroise, David Alfaro Siquieros, Portrait of a Decade (1997) and Rubén Gallo(ed.), The Mexico City Reader (2004).

Memoirs
French List
Biography