#Picasso the reader series#

and exquisite fashion, of joy and despair, of sentiment and cruelty. It was also an age of extremes: of starving poverty. But the following century was a period of vigorous expansion, of scientific and artistic genius, of blossoming reason, civility, elegance and manners. With thousands of homes and many landmark buildings destroyed, it had been brought to the brink. London in the eighteenth century was very much a new city, risen from the ashes of the Great Fire. Why did the most advanced pictorial genius of the era, this embodiment of modernism, immerse himself in a past age which had served as inspiration only to the most hackneyed academicians of the past century? What brought this tireless explorer of form into that most outmoded field of. Shiff wrote the following to characterize the generally negative reaction to Picasso's later works following a retrospective show in 1973: Throughout his life he remained true to that fundamentally postmodernist conviction.Ĩ.

Early in this century, Picasso had stepped outside of representation and had seen its shifting planes, perceiving the fact that there were many 'more or less convincing lies,'. His understanding of the relativism of style, his strategies of deconstruction and appropriation, and the radical perceptions that prompted those explorations, all foresaw the conception of reality and representation that would prevail at the end of the twentieth century. Cohen's interpretation of Picasso's late graphics concludes that they as well as Picasso's early experimentation in formalism anticipated many of the preoccupations of late twentieth century postmodernism:

On the use of excessive referentiality or literalization of metaphor to reveal the illegitimacy of language and of representation in Celestina, see González Echevarría 14-32.ħ. From Malcolm Read, George Shipley and Peter Dunn, to Mary Malcolm Gaylord and Mathew Bentley, the modern self-referentiality and anti-heroic conception of human discourse in Celestina has been an increasing point of departure for scholarly approaches to the text.Ħ. In addition to the studies cited by González Echevarría and Severin, there is a growing bibliography of Celestina scholars who have addressed various aspects of the (post) modernity of Rojas's text. Suite 347 of 1968 was not the first time Picasso had treated the Celestina motif his portrait of a noted Barcelona prostitute titled 'La Celestina' is a well-known image from his youth, and shows that his fascination with Rojas's text dates at least from 1904.ĥ.

#Picasso the reader series#

Jean Sutherland Boggs gives a list of the 'astronomical' cast of characters invented or recouped from earlier works by Picasso for Suite 347 to show the 'intensity of his narrative imagination,' of which the Celestina images are only one series (154-55).Ĥ. Barr Sharrar, for example, states that there is 'what could be called a Spanish series within Suite 347' identifiable by the nudes in mantillas and the 'duennas' (i.e., Celestina figures) that accompany them, but he misses the allusion to Rojas (518).ģ. Neither serves the other, but the visual and verbal combine in constructive play. One might immediately think of Picasso's Synthetic Cubist works, in which scraps of newspaper containing words are juxtaposed next to visual imagery. The obtrusive placement of the prints turns illustrated book into 'art' book, and forces the words of Rojas's text to bend according to the needs of Picasso's visual artistry. Therefore, as Baker and Nowak have pointed out: In fact, 'Picasso did not want the text to be printed on the verso of the leaves with etchings' (Fynn Johnson and Stein 164).

Picasso evidently envisioned a different kind of synergy between Rojas's text and his own visual narrative. After reviewing the order of the images in relation to the text, I can find no direct correspondence between written word and the image printed next to it. The order of the images in this article corresponds to the needs of my argument, and not to their disposition in the book, nor to the order of their creation. 1 comes from the edition of La Célestine (Paris: Editions de l'Atelier Crommelynck, 1971) bound with Picasso's Celestina etchings, 400 copies of which were sold through the Louise Leiris Gallery. Like the other images in this article, Fig. Currently he teaches Spanish language, literature and culture at the University of Houston-Downtown.ġ. His area of specialization is early modern Spanish literature, with particular interests in Fernando de Rojas's Celestina, the picaresque novel and the interplay of visual and literary representation. in Spanish Literature from Princeton University.