Portraiture has managed to flourish in modern painting in spite of the popularization of photography, the decline of traditional patronage, and modernism's increasing emphasis on abstraction. However problematic modern styles have been for representational art, painters have continued to discover new possibilities in the imaging of the human face. This book explores the challenge of the modernist portrait through the multiple solutions proposed by its foremost protagonist and, in so doing, becomes the first volume ever published on the subject of Picasso and portraiture. The hundreds of works reproduced here—most of them unfamiliar, some virtually unknown — demonstrate the remarkable range of Picasso's experimentation in all its stylistic and psychological diversity.
The book opens with an authoritative, broadranging essay by William Rubin; the nine essays that follow—all by major contemporary scholars and critics—examine different periods and aspects of Picasso's career and clarify personal relationships between the artist and his subjects. It closes with an essay by Mr. Rubin on the late portraits. Numerous photographs, some never before published and many by outstanding photographers, present the portrait subjects as seen through the eye of the camera.