The Success and Failure of Picasso

By John Berger

Book Overview

Booker Prize-winning author John Berger gives us a stunning critical assessment of Pablo Picasso: At the height of his powers, Picasso was the artist as revolutionary: breaking through the niceties of form in order to mount a direct challenge to the values of his time. At the height of his fame, he was the artist as royalty: incalculably wealthy, universally idolized--and wholly isolated. Berger--one of this century's most insightful cultural historians--trains his penetrating gaze upon this most prodigious and enigmatic painter and on the Spanish landscape and very particular culture that shaped his life and work. Writing with a novelist's sensuous evocation of character and detail, and drawing on an erudition that embraces history, politics, and art, Berger follows Picasso from his childhood in Malaga to the Blue Period and Cubism, from the creation of Guernica to the painted etchings of his final years. He gives us the full measure of Picasso's triumphs and unsparing reckoning of their cost--in exile, in loneliness, and in a desolation that drove him, in his last works, into an old man's furious and desperate frenzy at the beauty of what he could no longer create.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679737251
• ISBN13: 9780679737254
• Release Date: November 1993
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

What's a genius anyway?

John Berger is a critic with a real sense of decency: never too high-falutin, smart and responsible. He asks us to see beautiful objects, not in their staid isolation in the museum setting, but in the context of social history. It is obvious that Picasso was a genius. He saw and drew things that evoke wonders and passions. But is that all? The central essay here is "The Moment of Cubism." Berger paints a general portrait of a distinct era of possibility: artistic and social and political. The explosion of Cubism is but a moment in a larger moment of real revolution. Not just "ways of seeing" but ways of living, thinking, hoping. Berger reminds us that Picasso needed the times (Europe), he also, more specifically needed friends and support. After all, there were two who brought forth cubism; moreover, there were the likes of Cezanne.Berger asks the question that is overlooked in the constant reverence of Picasso's potency (echoing Benjamin Buchloh on the "ciphers of regression"): was Picasso genius throughout his career or was that moment (historical and aesthetic) the real genius?(For more on Berger, read his two inspired novels: "G." and "To the Wedding.")