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Creator and Destroyer
by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington
Brilliant and compelling, this biography will forever change the way the world looks at Picasso -- the man, the life, the art. Five years in the making, Picasso brings a man who has become a myth to full, magnificent life, powerfully capturing his magnetism and obsessive passions. It is the richest, most intimate and most revealing portrait ever created of the man whose life and work are a personification of our tumultuous century. From his teenage passion for a gypsy boy to the chilling details of his last years, the author has recreated for the first time the tragic story of a man unable to love and driven to dominate and humiliate the many women -- and men -- who fell under his spell.
The struggle between his power to create and his compulsion to destroy was at the heart of Picasso's life. Here is the Don Juan bent on seduction and domination, the man who invented reality in his life no less than in his art, the mystical atheist who longed to outsmart his creator, the man of the people who spent millions to keep himself in bohemian splendour, the monumental egoist who became a proud member of the Communist Party. This remarkable account of a man at war with himself and the universe is illuminated by previously unpublished material garnered through hundreds of interviews with people who were part of his life, including his daughter Maya and Francoise Gilot, who shared his life for 10 years, bore to him two children and reveals her much that she left out of her own bestselling book on him.
With supporting players like Matisse, Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway and Sartre, and with a shifting court of poets, journalists, artists and politicians, Picasso is not only the engrossing life of the most idolized artist who ever lived but also an astonishing portrait of our century, a century Picasso mirrored and epitomized in all its brilliance and all its darkness.
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