Pablo
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A prodigious talent. A passionate visionary. Pablo Picasso.
An award-winning graphic biography of one of the world’s best-loved artists, Pablo follows Picasso’s artistic career from his origins in penury to the advent of modern art. Taking in the artist’s early life among the bohemians of Montmartre, with all of its scandal and frustration, and his turbulent relationship with his model and lover Fernande, Julie Birmant and Clément Oubrerie show how Picasso’s style developed in response to his friendships and rivalries. An entertaining and beautifully drawn account, this authoritative graphic novel explores the themes and obsessions – among them, sex, death and his great nemesis, Henri Matisse – that drove Picasso to express himself.
"Sardonic, informative, and sexy…" –Library Journal
“What a beautiful thing it is. Every frame is full of colour; every speech bubble crackles with life. You can almost smell the tobacco, the fish soup, the turpentine.” –The Observer
"It is this frivolous atmosphere that Birmant and Oubrerie evoke in Pablo. It is a great series that does not become a slave to history and it succeeds in evoking an atmosphere that involves the reader in an educational way." –Broken Frontier
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
French documentary filmmaker Birmant and artist Oubrerie (Aya of Yop City) tell the story of Picasso through the magic of memory and symbolism. The narrator/storyteller is Fernande Olivier, Picasso's muse and the subject of more than 60 of his paintings. Though Pablo is the book's title, the story is very much told from Fernande's perspective. Cursive lettering in the narrative captions symbolize Fernande's perspective and her magical-realist/symbolic view. When she remembers her "elegant, distant, fragrant" mother, we see a talking bottle of perfume; her "man of the world" and moneyed father is a disembodied top hat. Fernande's frustrations with her lot in life being a stoic woman trapped in an abusive marriage lead her to change her name and run off to Paris, where she encounters Picasso, his art rival Henri Matisse, and the birth of the 20th-century art world. Her story is a romance and a biography, as well as a portrait of an era reminiscent of From Hell, but told from a female perspective.
