This is the first critical examination of Pablo Picasso's use of religious imagery and the religious import of many of his works with secular subject matter. Though Picasso was an avowed atheist, his work employs spiritual themesÑand, often, traditional religious iconography. In five engagingly written, accessible chapters, Jane Daggett Dillenberger and John Handley address Picasso's cryptic 1930 painting of the Crucifixion; the artist's early life in the Catholic church; elements of transcendence in Guernica; Picasso's later, fraught relationship with the church, which commissioned him in the 1950s to paint murals for the Temple of Peace chapel in France; and the centrality of religious themes and imagery in bullfighting, the subject of countless Picasso drawings and paintings.

Religious subject matter is not central in 20th century art. One might therefore suspect that, for the avantgarde, the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) would have eclipsed religion altogether. However, as Juan José Lahuerta argues in this book, the war caused a considerable revival of certain themes of religious art. In particular, it intensified Pablo Picasso's lifelong preoccupation with the subject of the Crucifixion. The work of the Swiss surrealist painter Max von Moos (1903-1979) throws additional light on the paradox at hand. In 1938, i.e. one year after Picasso painted "Guernica," von Moos published an essay entitled "Religious Painting of Our Time" that addresses some of the critical issues then confronted by church art: issues of communication and expression, realism and abstraction that turn out to offer surprising insights into Picasso's art - if not into modern art altogether.

Francis Bacon - Max Beckmann - John Bellany - Arthur Boyd - Leonora Carrington - Marc Chagall - Max Ernst - Frida Kahlo - Henri Matisse - Pablo Picasso - George Segal - Andy Warhol - and other.

Two images of Andy Warhol exist in the popular press: the Pope of Pop of the Sixties, and the partying, fright-wigged Andy of the Seventies. In the two years before he died, however, Warhol made over 100 paintings, drawings, and prints based on Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper. The dramatic story of these works is told in this book for the first time. Revealed here is the part of Andy Warhol that he kept very secret: his lifelong church attendance and his personal piety. Art historian and curator Jane Daggett Dillenberger explores the sources and manifestations of Warhol's spiritual side, the manifestations of which are to be found in the celebrated paintings of the last decade of Warhol's life: his Skull paintings, the prints based on Renaissance religious artwork, the Cross paintings, and the large series based on The Last Supper.>

Modernism and Authority presents a provocative new take on the early paintings of Pablo Picasso and the writings of Guillaume Apollinaire. Charles Palermo argues that references to theology and traditional Christian iconography in the works of Picasso and Apollinaire are not mere symbolic gestures; rather, they are complex responses to the symbolist art and poetry of figures important to them, including Paul Gauguin, Charles Morice, and Santiago Rusi–ol. The young Picasso and his contemporaries experienced the challenges of modernity as an attempt to reflect on the lost relation to authority. For the symbolists, art held authority by revealing something compellingÑsomething to which audiences must respond lest they lose claim to their own moral authority. Instead of the total transformation of the reader or viewer that symbolist creators envision, Picasso and Apollinaire imagine a divided self, responding only partially or ambivalently to the work of artÕs call. Navigating these problems of symbolist art and poetry entails considering the nature of the work of art and of oneÕs response to it, the modern subjectÕs place in history, and the relevance of historical truth to our methodological choices in the present.

Shows and describes some of Picasso's earliest artwork and discusses influences on his work