Picasso: Style and Meaning

By Elizabeth Cowling
Phaidon Press, New York, NY and London, England, 2004
704 pp., illus. 119 b/w, 507 col. Paper, $49.95
ISBN: 0-7148-429-31.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0362, USA

ballast@netins.net

Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) has been dead for more than thirty years, but his fame and influence continue. Most recently, one of his early paintings, titled A Boy with Pipe (1905), was sold at auction for a record sum of $104 million. At the same time, there is no decrease in the number and variety of publications about his life and art, including scholarly treatises on (in recent years) his fascination with photography, his indebtedness to African art, and his vexatious relations with women. This massive new study, Picasso: Style and Meaning, which is the paperbound edition of a title that premiered initially in 2002, deals largely with the issue of the inconstancy of style in Picasso’s development, or, as critic John Berger once claimed, the apparent failure of his work (after 1914) to progress in "a steady ascending curve." The author of this book is a Picasso scholar who teaches art history at the University of Edinburgh, and was recently one of the curators for the international Matisse Picasso exhibition. Because there are so many events and publications that relate to the life of Picasso, and because so much of it is redundant and/or second-rate, there is always the risk that one might overlook a fresh, well-written study about the less familiar aspects of his long, productive life. Among the virtues of this book is the author’s consistently interesting use of Picasso’s work placed side by side with surprisingly similar images that very likely played some role in his thought process. For example, Picasso’s famous portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906) is shown next to J.A.D. Ingres’s portrait of Louis-Francois Bertin (1832); while his Cubist sheet metal sculpture of a guitar (1912) is juxtaposed with a page of guitar parts from an article on guitar-making in Diderot’s Encyclopedia (1767). The other great strength of this volume is the extraordinary clarity of its narrative, in acknowledgement of which it received the 2003 British Academy Book Prize for scholarly books for non-scholars.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 19, No. 3, Spring 2004)