In the original dustsheet. Black cloth binding with silver title on the spine.

• F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

• If any book title is appropriate, this one is. “Picasso, Creator and Destroyer” by Arianna Huffington, shows the reader a person who was both a consummate artist (the creator) and a terrible human being (the destroyer). Huffington relates Picasso’s early days including periods when he shuttled back and forth between the artistic challenges of Paris and the comfort of his Spanish roots and his later years as a wealthy, God-like figure in the art world. This is the second time I’ve read this book, and this time around the sociopathic nature of Picasso as he is portrayed here strikes me. While the book gives ample attention to Picasso’s protean artistic accomplishments, what strikes the reader is his failure as a human being. His life as portrayed in this book is zero sum – on the plus side his artistic accomplishments, on the minus side his megalomania. One can appreciate this book as a history of Picasso and the Paris of his time and/or a portrait of a not very nice person. Toward the end, the book becomes somewhat repetitive as Picasso’s life descends into domination by his last mistress/wife and into reduced creative vigor, but is nevertheless a fascinating portrait of one of our seminal artists.

Arianna Huffington is the co-founder, president, and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, and author of fifteen books. In May 2005, she launched The Huffington Post, a news and blog site that quickly became one of the most widely-read, linked to, and frequently-cited media brands on the Internet. In 2012, the site won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. She has been named to Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people and the Forbes Most Powerful Women list. Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was 16 and graduated from Cambridge University with an M.A. in economics. At 21, she became president of the famed debating society, the Cambridge Union.

She serves on numerous boards, including The Center for Public Integrity and The Committee to Protect Journalists. Her book, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder, debuted at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list. Her 15th book, The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life One Night At A Time, on the science, history and mystery of sleep, will be published on April 5, 2016.

                                                                         Picasso 1908

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.

Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. After 1906, the Fauvist work of the older artist Henri Matisse motivated Picasso to explore more radical styles, beginning a fruitful rivalry between the two artists, who subsequently were often paired by critics as the leaders of modern art. Picasso’s output, especially in his early career, is often periodized. While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904–1906), the African-influenced Period (1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), also referred to as the Crystal period. Much of Picasso’s work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style, and his work in the mid-1920s often has characteristics of Surrealism. His later work often combines elements of his earlier styles.

Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.