"In the 30 years since his death, the epic career of Pablo Picasso has sustained endless parsing and subdivision, yielding exhibitions of ever sharper focus. But few of these shows equal the spectacular close-up provided by Picasso: The Cubist Portraits of Fernande Olivier at the National Gallery of Art... [A] revelatory, singularly moving show."
Roberta Smith, New York Times "In this ... Read more... exhibition ... we get to see one subject, explored in depth by one astounding artist, at one impossibly important moment in the history of art. It gives us the chance to really concentrate on a few works that don't stop posing questions and striking sparks off each other... Picasso is working without the rules
and without a net
and every single move has to be figured out from scratch, tested just by launching into it... I cannot think of any other moment in the history of art where an artist has this much freedom, and has to decide all for himself what he should do with it... He's not working toward cubism, or any other -ism for that matter. He's just working... Picasso is not the alchemist-magician that became his favorite pose; he's more like an eager young genius working long hours in the lab."
Blake Gopnik, Washington Post "Picasso is intellectually challenging and rewarding, argued convincingly with the aid of 150 reproductions... A conviction that drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography were deliberately and innovatively interwoven in Picasso's processes of creation unifies and enlivens this volume throughout."
Choice "The book is so well and so fully illustrated that one could imagine the exhibition had come to one's desk... The three essays accompanying the reproductions add substantially to the knowledge and considerations most of us could bring to its sharply focused theme. Additional illustrations in the essays ensure that the book becomes, in this respect, the exhibition augmented."
Norbert Lynton, The ArtBook "The book is so well and so fully illustrated that one could imagine the exhibition had come to one's desk... The three essays accompanying the reproductions add substantially to the knowledge and considerations most of us could bring to its sharply focused theme. Additional illustrations in the essays ensure that the book becomes, in this respect, the exhibition augmented."
Norbert Lynton, The Art Book Show Less