Me Myself And I: Photo Portraits of Picasso - Tapa dura

From early shots of the Cubist days in Paris to clowning candids in his final years, 'MemyselfandI' (Hatje Cantz, 272 pages, $45) presents a panorama of Picasso's life and shows his determination to make his art inseperable from it. Mischievous and mutable and manipulative - all his moods come through here, most often because Picasso insisted on the pose.--Editors "The Wall Street Journal "

Almost all of the great twentieth-century portraitists photographed Pablo Picasso, including Cecil Beaton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Man Ray, Irving Penn, and Lee Miller. Picasso was one of the most frequently photographed celebrities of the last century, as these staged portraits, classic sittings, and snapshots prove.

This opulently illustrated volume is the first to examine the tense relationship between Picasso’s wish to control the presentation of his public persona and the ambitions and ideas of the famous photographers. Picasso becomes the example for an investigation into what kind of role the portrait of the artist plays in shaping his myth. While some of the photographers were commissioned by Picasso himself, were even friends with him, they considered themselves autonomous artists. Last but not least, the book examines the question of if (and to what extent) each of the photographic visual vocabularies was capable of asserting itself against the domineering presence of the century’s most famous artist.

Artists featured (selection):
Rogi André, Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Bill Brandt, Brassaï, René Burri, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lucien Clergue, Jean Cocteau, Denise Colomb, Robert Doisneau, David Douglas Duncan, Jaques-Henri Lartigue, Herbert List, Dora Maar, Madame d'Ora, Willy Maywald, Gjon Mili, Lee Miller, Inge Morath, Arnold Newman, Roberto Otero, Irving Penn, Edward Quinn, Man Ray, Gotthard Schuh, Michel Sima, André Villiers.