In spring 198o, for a highly regarded art publisher, I edited the German edition of the catalogue of the largest Picasso exhibition yet seen, the New York Museum of Modern Art's "Pablo Picasso. A Retrospective". In the process, I took the opportunity to deepen my familiarity with Picasso's work, which is of an extent unparalleled in the history of art, and to study his immense output and creative versatility. It is indeed the work of one of the century's great geniuses.

Some years later I had the good fortune to meet a collector and bookworm whose magnificent library included no less than fifty metres of shelves devoted to Picasso. When I asked if any one of the endless books on Picasso did justice to the universality of his creative genius - as painter and draughtsman, etcher and lithographer, sculptor and potter - he said no. Indeed, he went on, to this day no one has even managed to put an approximate number on the original works Picasso made. There must be over thirty thousand.

Ever since, I have been haunted by the wish to produce a book on Picasso that would be more than merely an addition to that endless shelfload. This book is the result of that wish. With luck it will have succeeded in conveying to the common reader and art lover something of the inventive wealth of Picasso's oeuvre, of his seemingly infinite artistic imagination.

Editor's Preface

The Image of the Artist

The Making of a Genius 189o-1898

The Art of Youth 1898-1901

The Blue Period 1901-1904

The Rose Period 1904-1906

In the Laboratory of Art 19o6/o7

Analytical Cubism 19o7-1912

Synthetic Cubism 1912-1915

The Camera and the Classicist 1916-1924

A Juggler with Form 1925-1936

War. Art and "Guernica" 1937

The Picasso Style 1937-1943

Politics and Art 1943-1953

The Presence of the Past 1954-1963

The Case of "Las Meninas" 1957

The Old Savage 1963-1973

The Legend of the Artist

Appendices (by Ingo E Walther)

Pablo Picasso ,88,-I973 A Chronology

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements and Picture Credits

Index of names