Focusing on prints (etchings, drypoints, color lithographs), Picasso and the Circus presents a pivotal moment in Picasso's early career, between his Blue and Rose Periods, when he was increasingly drawn to the subject of the circus in Paris. The book analyzes the circus and related spectacles in fin-de-siecle Paris, and how they were interpreted by print arts of the era, including Jules Cheret, Henri-Gabriel Ibels, Henri Gray, Edgar Chahine, and Richard Ranft. It then considers Pablo Picasso's Suite de Saltimbanques (1904-6), an early and highly important series of etchings and drypoints related primarily to acrobats (saltimbanques). The popularity of the circus in late 19th-and early 20th-century Paris certainly resonates in the works of many artists. From sensational--and sensationalized--feats of strength and prowess to moving depictions of poverty and the life of the outcast, these prints not only expand our understanding of the period, they also represent some of Picasso's finest work.

41 paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and documents, relating to Picasso's Family of Saltimbanques in the Chester Dale collection and to the theme of vagabond performers, marked the centennial of Pablo Picasso's birth.

The artist Pablo Picasso's cat Minou influences him to discontinue his Blue Period style of painting to begin creating works that will sell more quickly.

Beautifully illustrated and filled with rich historical detail and colorful anecdotes, this is a vibrant history for all those who have ever dreamed of running away to the circus, now in paperback. “Step right up!” and buy a ticket to the Greatest Show on Earth—the Big Top, containing death-defying stunts, dancing bears, roaring tigers, and trumpeting elephants. The circus has always been home to the dazzling and the exotic, the improbable and the impossible—a place of myth and romance, of reinvention, rebirth, second acts, and new identities. Asking why we long to soar on flying trapezes, ride bareback on spangled horses, and parade through the streets in costumes of glitter and gold, this captivating book illuminates the history of the circus and the claim it has on the imaginations of artists, writers, and people around the world. Traveling back to the circus’s early days, Linda Simon takes us to eighteenth-century hippodromes in Great Britain and intimate one-ring circuses in nineteenth-century Paris, where Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso became enchanted with aerialists and clowns. She introduces us to P. T. Barnum, James Bailey, and the enterprising Ringling Brothers and reveals how they created the golden age of American circuses. Moving forward to the whimsical Circus Oz in Australia and to New York City’s Big Apple Circus and the grand spectacle of Cirque du Soleil, she shows how the circus has transformed in recent years. At the center of the story are the people—trick riders and tightrope walkers, sword swallowers and animal trainers, contortionists and clowns—that created the sensational, raucous, and sometimes titillating world of the circus.

The circus as a focal point of twentieth-century American art.

Georges Seurat (1859–1891) created just six major figure paintings during his lifetime, one of which, the alluring Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque), has remained the most challenging to interpret since it first intrigued viewers at the 1888 Salon des Indépendants in Paris. Unlike Seurat’s earlier sunlit scenes, Circus Sideshow presents a nighttime tableau depicting a parade—a street show enticing passersby to purchase tickets. With its geometrically precise composition, muted colors, and elements of abstraction, the painting stands apart as a masterpiece of Neo-Impressionism and heralds Seurat’s subsequent depictions of popular entertainments. This book, the first comprehensive study of Circus Sideshow, situates the painting in the context of nineteenth-century Paris and of the many social changes France was undergoing. Renowned art historian Richard Thomson illuminates the roles of caricature, naturalist and avant-garde painting, and circus advertising; examines Seurat’s use of contemporary aesthetic theory; and discusses how artists ranging from Rouault to Picasso mined the sideshow theme into the twentieth century. Illustrated with Seurat’s related drawings, works by other artists, and period posters and broadsides, Seurat’s Circus Sideshow delves into the history of traveling circuses and seasonal fairs in France, exploring the ongoing appeal of this traditional form of popular entertainment through the fin de siècle. Two additional essays describe the painting’s enthusiastic reception in New York upon its 1929 debut and present the results of a fresh technical examination of the canvas, making this volume the definitive resource on one of Seurat’s most captivating works.