Pablo Picasso: The Lithographs
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Graphic Design
Pablo Picasso: The Lithographs Details
About the Author Werner Spies was born in Tbingen in 1937, and since 1975 he has been a professor of 20th century art at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf. He is currently head of the Muse National de l'Art Moderne at the Center Pompidou in Paris. Spies has gained international recognition as a critic and essayist, and he has authored several seminal works on 20th century art in addition to editing a catalogue raisonn of the works of Max Ernst. Read more
Reviews
This is an imperfect book but an essential one. It is both a Catalogue Raisonne of the lithographic works of Pablo Picasso, and a catalogue of the prints in the collection of the Graphikmuseum Pablo Picasso Munster which holds the most complete (although not quite complete) collection of Picasso lithographs in the world.A lot of painstaking work has gone into compiling and documenting these 'leaves' as the editors call them into a unitary source. For the editors not only concerned themselves with cataloging heretofore undocumented images, and correlating Mourlot and Rau numbers to their own numbering system they also assigned prospective numbers to images that are known but not owned by the museum.In addition the editors included as much relevant information not only about the edition, paper, plate size, etc. but also of characteristics of the individual prints included in the books such as penned notations, etc. even down to locating where it occurs on the sheet.The folio-sized book in 304 pps with 870 color illustrations was printed and bound in Germany to the highest quality standards so that one feels as though he is holding a work of art in itself when he is leafing through the volume and to say that it is lavishly illustrated would not be exaggeration. This book should be owned by anyone interested in Picasso's prints or who takes an interest in his entire oevre; and it is essential to any collector of his lithographs.One day this book will be even more scarce than it is today so I recommend owning it now rather than having to pay much more for it in a few years.Four stars only because I still can't figure out, exactly, the numbering system.
