Picasso: Creator and Destroyer

by Arianna Huffington

Book Overview

Here is Picasso as never seen before, the indefatigable painter, the bohemian, the sexual sadist, the betrayer, the loyal Communist, the father, and, ultimately, the man sacrificed on the altar of his... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671454463
• ISBN13: 9780671454463
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 558 Pages
• Weight: 2.15 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Bias but delicious

This book gives the wider vision of Picasso to people who don't know him more than the cubiclism painting. The author loves and hates him in the same time, this idea can pass through the readers. I'm not considering it's totally bias opinion but I guess if you did interview everybody around Picasso, you might write the same book as Arianna. Very interesting book and I'm not disappointed by it.

Picasso- Creator and Destroyer

Fine reading;the best biographical work on Picasso. Fair review of his multi-facetted life and personality. A portrait written with great psychological depth, flair, knowledge of the arts and fascinating insights and comments from those who knew him. Ariana Stassinopoulos' balanced story of both his weaknesses and strengths is a ''must read''.

Bad Man Great Artist?

"Picasso" by Arianna Huffington is a very thorough book that can probably be skipped, except possibly by those with an intense interest in Picasso's personal life. For the rest of us it is sufficient to know that Picasso had no friends or family, just groupies (many of whom were family) throughout his life, and, to a person, he treated them despicably. For example, he usually had several women at a time who each worshiped him. He would play them off against each other, often openly and in public, seemingly in an attempt to provoke jealous rage, murder, depression, or suicide (he succeeded grandly at all except for murder, but his best friend took care of that one for him). He found ways to treat the male groupies with equal misery. But, soap operas should last thirty minutes at most. This book goes relentlessly on and on for 500 pages determined to prove that Picasso did not take one decent breath in his whole entire long life.At a certain point the reader begins to wonder that "thou dost protest too much." So then how did he come to be hailed as the genius of the 20th Century; as the man who showed us what our world really was or at least what it really looked like? The answer to this question is somewhat complex. The easiest part of it is that he was like a human camera. He could paint exactly what he saw as if he were a camera, and, he could paint any impression of what he saw, better than any human being alive. He was half way home on that talent alone, meaningless though it may have been. After all, if you can throw a ball better than anyone you are halfway home too. But Picasso's subject was, seemingly, important; one that intellectuals were interested in. Hence if he could capture their imaginations and somehow add their imprimatur to his painting talent the world would be at his feet, where he always felt it belonged. Picasso hung out in Paris with many of the world's leading intellectuals. He even wrote a play called "Desire Caught By the Tail" directed by Albert Camus in which Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir acted. The play was about 10 pages long and nothing more than a series of bizarre scenes similar to what might have appeared in his painting. When Picasso commented about literature he said "it seems many writers want to be painters" apparently not knowing that the descriptions of visual objects in literature are often mere back drops for the infinitely larger conceptual themes with which language artists deal. He really didn't seem to understand that there was more in the world than pictures. His friend Sartre, a legitimate genius, set the record straight about the essential triviality of pictures in "What is Literature" when he said, "even when Picasso attempted to approach the real world with "Guernica" does anyone think he changed even a single mind with that painting"? And this was before the visual world was forever trivialized by, affordable travel, cameras, video cameras, TV, and film. We don't need a great paint

A valuable book

The " modernism " Picasso launched was basically the conception of the artist's oeuvre as a diary, albeit he probably, along with most qf the art establishment, would be outraged by this point of view. That was his most significant first; his development of form, merely a bi - product of his auto - biographical method. This book enables us to see clearly the connection between the man and the works, instead of the usual european way of clouding the timid author's confusion about a complex artist with politically correct aestheticism. Whether Picasso's works are all, they're hyped up to be, when considered as individual paintings, is for the individual to decide; this book is about the man Picasso, his life, and as such most refreshing.