Picasso: The Self-portraits

The first book devoted to Picasso’s self-portraits, many held in private collections and published here for the first time. Much has been said and written about Picasso’s life and art, but until now his self-portraits have never been studied and presented in a single book, perhaps because the artist always left so many doubts about his work. Yet there is no doubt that Picasso depicted himself incessantly, whether in a discontinuous pencil sketch, as a flourish at the bottom of a letter, or on a giant canvas. At the suggestion of Picasso’s widow Jacqueline, the distinguished art historian Pascal Bonafoux began researching Picasso’s self-portraits more than forty years ago. This meticulously researched book presents the fruits of his decades-long project. From the first attributed painting in 1894 as a thirteen-year-old boy, to Picasso's final self-portrait in 1972, a year before his death, Bonafoux traces the evolution of the artist's life and art. Here is Picasso as a student; as a young bohemian; an impetuous artist in Paris; as a Harlequin; as a lover, husband, and father; and finally, as an old man facing his mortality. The book comprises some 170 drawings, paintings, and photographs, some from private collections and previously unpublished, bringing together for the first time the attributed self-portraits of this twentieth-century artistic genius.