Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

On his death Picasso left some 175 sketchbooks spanning over 60 years, their pages filled with drawings which were largely unknown even to close friends and scholars. This text presents a record of the day-to-day working life of the artist, and deals directly or indirectly with almost every phase of Picasso's career. Individual leaves as well as six sketchbooks are shown in full and in sequence, and six essays by art historians (Claude Picasso, E.A. Carmean, Robert Rosenblum, Theodore Reff, Rosalind E. Krauss, Sam Hunter, Gert Schiff and Francoise Gilot) each relate to a single sketchbook on the essayist's field of expertise.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This is the catalog of an exhibition held at the Pace Gallery in New York, with essays by six art writers and Claude Picasso and Francoise Gilot. Picasso saved almost everythingselections from his notebooks scan over 60 years. He had a personal calligraphic shorthand and monumental fertility of ideas. Six complete sketchbooks and fragments of 36 others are included as ``Saltimbanques'' give way to ``Demoiselles,'' ``Sabines,'' etc. Commentary runs the gamut from scholarly to personal reminiscence. An expensive, quality production of interest to artists, art school libraries, modern art history collections. Hara Seltzer, NYPL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Despite the fact that it is not, as the editors claim, a true catalogue raisonn;e, this gorgeously produced book is both an invaluable scholarly source for Picasso's little-known sketchbooks and a significant collection of essays by major Picasso scholars. In six essays of uniformly high quality, E.A. Carmean, Robert Rosenblum, Theodore Reff, Rosalind Krauss, Sam Hunter, and Gert Schiff explore issues raised by six of the sketchbooks-magnificently reproduced in toto-and the light they shed on Picasso's contemporary work. The catalog gives little information about the other 169 sketchbooks, with only one tiny reproduction from each. Although many of the reproduced pages have appeared in the Zervos catalogue raisonn;e of Picasso's oeuvre (C. Zervos, Pablo Picasso, 33v., Paris; Cahiers d'Art, 193278), more information than ever before has been gathered together here and beautifully reproduced. The book includes reminiscences by the artist's former companion Fran;oise Gilot and by his son Claude. A very important contribution to Picasso studies; the illustrations alone (71 color and more than 550 black and white) make this volume essential for scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduates.-P. Leighten, University of Delaware