In Life and Death in Picasso, Christopher Green for the first time sets out to look at how, through the manipulation of signs and pictorial language, Picasso oscillates between figures and objects, animating what is inanimate and vice versa. On one level this book can be experienced as a journey through Picassos imagination and his creative processes, while on a deeper level it helps us to understand by way of references to Apollinaire, Freud and Surrealist imagery, among other things the dense cluster of ideas and reflections associated with the presence of death in the underlying life of the artists works. As well as shedding light on aspects of Picassos work not previously studied in any depth, the book features a superb selection of art, providing an opportunity for readers to continue to rediscover the art of Picasso: an art that is more vital and more powerful than ever.

A groundbreaking and richly illustrated study of the leading artist of the twentieth century. In this original and innovative book, Christopher Green explores how Pablo Picasso, through the manipulation of pictorial signs, explored ideas about the living and the dead. Oscillating between the animate and the inanimate, Picasso created objects that live, and figures that are as dead as objects.

Covering the period from the creation of the Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907 to the artist’s association with the Surrealists in the early 1930s, the book offers a journey through Picasso’s imagination and reveals—by way of Apollinaire, Breton, and Freud, among others—the ideas and reflections associated with life and death in his work.

Published in association with the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, the book also includes an essay on Picasso’s biomorphic motifs by the leading Spanish critic J. F. Yvars. 124 color, 9 b&w illustrations.