Picasso: The Blue and Rose Periods

A new affordable edition of the classic book charting Picasso’s journey from the bohemians of the Blue Period to the Rose Period’s acrobats and ingenues

This book, first published in 2019 and featuring around 80 works, is devoted to the paintings and sculptures of the young Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) from the so-called Blue and Rose periods, between 1901 and 1907. The masterpieces of these crucial years, every one of them a milestone on Picasso’s path to preeminence as the 20th century’s most famous artist, are presented together in an unparalleled concentration and quality. Picasso’s pictures from this phase are some of the finest and most emotionally compelling examples of modern painting and are counted among the most valuable works in the entire history of art.
Throughout the Blue period, Picasso depicted the material deprivation and psychological suffering of people on the margins of society, before turning in 1905 (when he had settled in Paris) to the themes of the Rose period: jugglers, acrobats and harlequins. His increasing deformation and fragmentation of the figure throughout this period heralded the emergence of the new pictorial language of Cubism.
The works of the Blue and Rose periods have a universal appeal and poignancy. Existential themes?life, love, sexuality, fate and death?find embodiment in the delicate beauty of young female and male figures, and in depictions of children and of old people scarred by life.