In 1900, at around the time of his nineteenth birthday, Pablo Picasso went to Paris to visit the Universal Exhibition and to have his first experience of the art capital of the world. His training had been in provincial Spanish art schools, but the following year he was offered a large exhibition at the prestigious Vollard Gallery and he became familiar with the bohemian district of Montmartre and its gaudy pleasures. Yet only a few years later he was challenging Matisse for the position of leader of the French avant-garde and was set on his revolutionary path as a universal artist.

This book follows Picasso’s discovery of art and life in the French capital and examines his response to specific artists, including Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Steinlen, Puvis de Chavannes, Rodin, and Cézanne. He soon began to forge a personal style, drawing on the process of painting itself, which blurred the traditional distinctions between imitation and reality, culminating in perhaps the most seminal painting of the twentieth century, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

This book accompanies the major international exhibition, “Picasso in Paris, 1900–1907: Eating Fire,” on view at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (February 18–May 29, 2011) and the Museu Picasso, Barcelona (June 30–October 15, 2011).

About the Contributor(s)

Marilyn McCully is an internationally recognized Picasso expert. She has organized numerous international exhibitions and written widely about Picasso, his work and his background in Spain. She was the first authority to organize a comprehensive show of Picasso’s unique ceramics (Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1998–99), and prepared exhibitions of Picasso ceramics for Ferrara, Málaga, and the 2005 Expo in Aichi, Japan. She is co-curator of “Three Decades of Picasso’s Drawings,” an exhibition to be held at the Frick Collection, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 2011–12. She is currently preparing a book on Picasso, featuring correspondence and writing that will be translated into English for the first time. She lives in London.