How is one to write about a man who is himself a legend? Pablo Picasso--no artist's name is more famous today, no artist's work more widely known. To do him full justice would require volumes; on the other hand, a mere sketch reduces an Olympian to a stick figure. This book is neither a compendious study, nor a brief survey/ With its text, picture commentaries, and lavish illustrations in color and in black-and-white, the reader will find his way to an introductory view or a concentrated review--depending on his previous knowledge of the master's career--of the full sweep of Picasso's phenomenal diversity and abundance. A powerful imagination surges through Picasso's art, constantly changing the course of his work--which, however, always reflects the passage of the human spirit through the vicissitudes of life. New styles, new forms, new materials--we have come to expect these from Picasso, but we can never anticipate them. No artist of our era, and perhaps none in the history of art, can match Picasso's forceful variety, which ranges from his protean talent as a young man to his later, impetuous espousal of techniques, materials, world events, and most recently, of masterworks by other painters, in which he acknowledges his kinship with their genius. Paintings, sculptures, ceramics, graphic art of many kinds; Blue Period, Cubism, Surrealism--one can easily become bewildered among there many facets of Picasso's art. Yet with this text and these illustrations we begin to recognize a man of our time, a warm, suffering, triumphant, intimate, formidable human being, prodigiously gifted but not unknowable. Picasso is more than a legend; as our greatest artist today, his works are ours to discover, to admire, and to make our own. This book seeks to guide the reader to this privileged goal--book jacket flap.