Fernande Olivier was the first real love in the life of Picasso, and the years she spent with the great artist, 1904 to 1912, coincide with some of his most revolutionary work. "Loving Picasso" brings Oliver's memoirs to life with archival photos, reproductions of her own artwork, and a selection of superb portraits of her by Picasso himself. 82 illustrations, 10 in full color.

"The French Riviera, spring 1936. It's off-season in the lovely seaside village of Juan-les-Pins, where seventeen-year-old Ondine cooks with her mother in the kitchen of their family-owned Cafe Paradis. A mysterious new patron who's slipped out of Paris and is traveling under a different name has made an unusual request--to have his lunch served to him at the nearby villa he's secretly rented ... Pablo Picasso is at a momentous crossroads in his personal and professional life--and for him, art and women are always entwined ... New York, present day. Caeline, a Hollywood makeup artist who's come home for the holidays, learns from her mother Julie that Grandmother Ondine once cooked for Picasso"--

Fred Baldwin's life took a turn in the direction of the extraordinary when he decided to interview and photograph Pablo Picasso. In his last year of college, he delivered a letter with own drawings to the artist. This made Picasso laugh and open the door. Baldwin's life changed. He followed his dream, used his imagination, overcame fear, and acted - now he could accomplish anything. What followed were picture stories about reindeer migrations, a day and a night with the Ku Klux Klan, Nobel Prize coverage, cod fishing in Arctic Norway, polar bear expeditions. Then underwater images of the fight of hooked Marlin in Mexico - an homage to Hemingway. In 1963, Baldwin joined the Civil Rights Movement, photographing Martin Luther King. A two-year stint as Peace Corps director in Borneo was followed by more photojournalism in India and Afghanistan. This account takes the reader to high adventure worldwide, but also to disaster and failure. This illustrated love affair with freedom shows how a camera became a passport to the world.0Fred Baldwin was born in 1928 in Switzerland. After earning his B.A. degree from Columbia College, New York in 1956, he began a freelance photography career which continued until 1987. Baldwin worked for LIFE, National Geographic, GEO, STERN, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Smithsonian Magazine, Newsweek, the New York Times and others.

Françoise Gilot's candid memoir remains the most revealing portrait of Picasso written, and gives fascinating insight into the intense and creative life shared by two modern artists. Françoise Gilot was in her early twenties when she met the sixty-one-year-old Pablo Picasso in 1943. Brought up in a well-to-do upper-middle-class family, who had sent her to Cambridge and the Sorbonne and hoped that she would go into law, the young woman defied their wishes and set her sights on being an artist. Her introduction to Picasso led to a friendship, a love affair, and a relationship of ten years, during which Gilot gave birth to Picasso’s two children, Paloma and Claude. Gilot was one of Picasso’s muses; she was also very much her own woman, determined to make herself into the remarkable painter she did indeed become. Life with Picasso, written with Carlton Lake and published in 1961, is about Picasso the artist and Picasso the man. We hear him talking about painting and sculpture, his life, his career, as well as other artists, both contemporaries and old masters. We glimpse Picasso in his many and volatile moods, dismissing his work, exultant over his work, entertaining his various superstitions, being an anxious father. But Life with Picasso is not only a portrait of a great artist at the height of his fame; it is also a picture of a talented young woman of exacting intelligence at the outset of her own notable career.

1932 was an extraordinary year for Picasso, even by his own standards. His paintings reached a new level of sensuality and he cemented his status as the most influential artist of the time. Over the course of this year he created some of his best-loved works, from colour-saturated portraits to surrealist drawings, developing ideas from the voluptuous sculptures he had made at his newly acquired country estate. In his personal life, throughout 1932, Picasso kept a delicate balance between tending to his wife Olga Khokhlova and their son Paulo, and his passionate love affair with Marie-Therese Walter, twenty-eight years his junior. This publication will bring these complex artistic and personal dynamics to life. It was also a year of invention and reflection. Having recently turned fifty, Picasso embarked on the first volume of what remains the most ambitious catalogue of an artist's work ever made. Meanwhile, the first ever retrospective of his work was staged, a show that featured new paintings alongside earlier works in a range of different styles. Picasso's journeys between his homes in Boisgeloup and Paris capture the contradictions of his existence at this pivotal moment: a life divided between countryside retreat and urban bustle, established wife and recent lover, painting and sculpture, sensuality and darkness. The year ended traumatically when Marie-Therese fell seriously ill after swimming, losing most of her iconic blond hair. In his final works of the year, Picasso transformed the event into scenes of rescue and rape, a dramatic finale to a year of love, fame and tragedy that pushed Picasso to the height of his creative powers. This lavishly illustrated publication will explore the major themes and concerns of 1932, in essays, artworks and archive photographs. It will strip away common myths to reveal the man and the artist in his full complexity and richness.

"What is the relationship between life, love, and art? This gorgeously illustrated book goes into both the art and love of artists couples from the 20th and 21st centuries"--Provided by publisher.