Stassinopoulos picasso biography

  • Powerfully capturing his charismatic magnetism and obsessive passion, Picasso is the most intimate portrait ever of the man whose life and work are a personification of this tumultuous century.
  • Impulsiveness, rebellion, guilt and sexual energy drove Picasso as he gave form to his inner demons.
  • This volume is a biography of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973).

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    Picasso: Creator and Destroyer

    This volume is a biography of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). As one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, Picasso is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. In this highly critical portrait, the author paints Picasso as a wretchedly flawed genius, sadistic and treacherous, a liar who betrayed friends and colleagues, and a misogynist who tormented a succession of wives and mistresses. The author draws on several sources for her biography, including interviews with Picasso's daughter, Maya, and Francoise Gilot, his mistress of ten years and the mother of two of his children. This work seizes chiefly on the dark side of genius; Picasso is examined in terms of his personal cruelties.

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    Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington

    The Monster as Artist

    Picasso: Creator and Destroyer.
    by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington.
    Simon & Schuster. 558 pp. $22.95.

    Few books in recent years have provoked so unanimous a critical drubbing as Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington’s recent biography of Pablo Picasso. Art historians, Picasso specialists, even general-interest book reviewers all over the country joined forces to revile Picasso: Creator and Destroyer as the candied-prose “fluff” of a publicity hound equipped with the art expertise of a freshman and the psychological insight of a soap-opera heroine—and, simultaneously, as a hatchet job, “one-sided and hate-filled,” “vengeful,” and “strident.”

    Moreover, these critiques of a book faulted for lack of objectivity themselves often took on a curiously personal note. Mrs. Huffington, a Cambridge-educated Greek, is the author of

  • stassinopoulos picasso biography

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    The Minotaur Without the Labyrinth : PICASSO Creator and Destroyer <i> by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington (Simon & Schuster: $22.95; 475 pp.) </i>

    This new study of Picasso’s life raises the issue that continually confronts anyone evaluating a biography. To what extent are the author’s conclusions based on a thorough and painstaking accumulation of all the evidence, judiciously assessed, and to what extent are they flighty, shallow, irresponsible, motivated by the desire to tell a racy story and hang the consequences?

    Despite 40 pages of source notes and 17 of bibliography, Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington’s “Picasso” appears to be largely a retelling of the artist’s own unreliable descriptions of his life (many now discredited), anecdotes already published, and questionable new material from interviews. The bekymmer of dealing with Picasso fryst vatten, as all Picasso scholars know, that the artist’s own immense archive containing, since he never threw anything away, ever