A Sum of Destructions: Picasso's Cultures and the Creation of Cubism [Anglais] [Relié]

Staller views "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" and the creation of Cubism as a defiant summation of Picasso's reactions to and interactions with his environment, beginning with M laga, where he was born, then La Corusa, Barcelona, and eventually Paris. Drawing on 20 years of research, she investigates the backgrounds of each of these places from a social and anthropological point of view. In her attempt to discover the background that eventually created the "Demoiselles" and Cubism, she provides details on such topics as early moviemaking, coded messages and gamesmanship, the Moors' relationship to Spain, Picasso's fascination with fetishisms, and the body language of fans, parasols, and handkerchiefs. However, in her effort to portray Picasso, the enfant terrible, she minimizes the supportive role of Braque, whom Picasso referred to as his wife in Cubism. She also omits Picasso's Saffron, Blue, and Pink periods and almost ignores Picasso's love/hate relationship with Matisse and the Steins, which may have been the main impetus for the creation of "Demoiselles." Still, Staller succeeds in capturing a Picasso who gave as good as he got and left behind a legacy under continuous exploration. The result is a unique, provocative, and enjoyable portrait of one of the most controversial painters in the history of 20th-century art. Recommended for large public libraries and all modern and European art book collections. Ellen Bates, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

"....[A]mbitious....massive....an amazing account of an artist who, dissected a thousand times, never ceases to declare new truths."

"[Staller has] interesting things to say about how the artist's childhood experiences and visual memories affected his work."

A Sum of Destructions was named a CHOICE Magazine 2003 Outstanding Academic Title of the Year, was a Finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, which "honors an especially distinguished book in the history of art," and won the Eleanor Tufts Award of The American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies, "for a distinguished publication on the arts of Iberia."

In this groundbreaking book, Natasha Staller closely examines for the first time the complex and intricate dialogue between Picasso and the multiple cultures of his early life. Staller argues that to a degree never before imagined Picasso's revolutionary Cubism was saturated with his past--inspired in part by competing and colliding images, myths, and ideas from a series of cultural legacies. She tracks Picasso on his odyssey through cultures: from Málaga, where he spent his first ten years, to La Coruña, Barcelona, and finally to Paris, where he moved as a young man. Picasso's most fundamental attitudes, she contends, all were formed in Málaga. Yet Cubism could not have been invented had he not moved to Paris. Each culture became a prism through which he viewed the next; in each case he actively transformed what he found.

Staller boldly illuminates what Cubism's radical attributes meant in historical and culturally specific terms. With vivid detail, she analyzes an unprecedented range of new, often archival, materials--from coded messages señoritas sent with fans to ritual re-enactments of holy wars, from enchanted characters of fairy tales to superstitions, bullfighting treatises, provincial art-school manuals, three-minute films, and Picasso's childhood works saved by his parents from the time he was nine.

A Sum of Destructions offers a new appreciation of Picasso's extraordinary ability to recast his cultural past as he grappled with his avant-garde present--to create stunningly original images, the most historically decisive of his life. Staller reinterprets major works from Demoiselles to Suze, and beyond, along the way transforming our understanding of both Picasso and his Cubist art.

Natasha Staller is Professor and Chair of the Department of Fine Arts, Amherst College.