A Picasso portfolio : prints from the Museum of Modern Art /

Wye (curator, prints and illustrated books, MoMA) here celebrates the Museum of Modern Art's close association with the artistic production and cultural eminence of Pablo Picasso. In conjunction with her curatorial team and drawing upon the museum's extensive collection, she ably represents the extraordinary iconographic invention, technical facility, thematic preoccupations, and visual fascination of Picasso's printmaking. She thereby demonstrates the significance of this component of his career and deftly places it within the colorful weft and warp of his professional and emotional alliances. The superbly reproduced monochrome and polychromatic prints are arranged in an effective alliance between chronology and predominant themes, typically as deeply traditional as radically reconfigured. The text in the various sections' introductions and in the catalogue interweaves descriptive with historical and technical commentary. Illuminating and literate, these contributions enhance the current literature on the artist, itself nicely summarized in the selective bibliography. Other supporting materials include judicious endnotes, a chronology, and a checklist of works. This book's readership will span both scholars and enthusiasts of this indomitable icon of modernist art practice. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and above; general readers. R. W. Liscombe University of British Columbia