Description

   At the peak of his abilities, Pablo Picasso was the performer as groundbreaking, to be able to install an immediate challenge to the ideals of his time busting through the niceties of type. In the peak of his popularity, he was the performer as royalty: incalculably rich, globally idolized−and totally isolated.   In this spectacular crucial evaluation, Steve Berger−one of this century's most informative social historians−trains his penetrating gaze upon this most enormous and enigmatic plumber and about the Spanish scenery and really specific tradition that shpaed his life and work. Composing with an authoris intense evocation of character and depth, and drawing on an erudition that holds history, politics, and art, Berger uses Picasso from his youth in Malaga for the Blue Time and Cubism, from the development of Guernica for the pained etchings of his closing years. He provides us the entire way of measuring Picasso's triumphs and an unsparing reckoning of the cost−in exile, in isolation, and in a desolation that owned him, in his final works, into a classic person's mad and determined craze in the splendor of what he might no further produce.