Name: picasso: a biography
SKU: 4688747
Price: 1223.00 TWD
Availability: InStock
Author: Patrick O'Brian
ISBN: 9780393311075

Type

Physical Book

Author

Patrick O'Brian

Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

Language

English

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

21.3x14x3 cm

Weight

0.68 kg.

ISBN13

9780393311075

Synopsis "picasso: a biography"

Patrick O'Brian's outstanding biography of Picasso is here available in paperback for the first time. It is the most comprehensive yet written, and the only biography fully to appreciate the distinctly Mediterranean origins of Picasso's character and art. Everything about Picasso, except his physical stature, was on an enormous scale. No painter of the first rank has been so awe-inspiringly productive. No painter of any rank has made so much money. A few painters have rivaled his life span of ninety years, but none has attracted so avid, so insatiable, a public interest. Patrick O'Brian knew Picasso sufficiently well to have a strong sense of his personality. The man that emerges from this scholarly, passionate, and brilliantly written biography is one of many contradictions: hard and tender, mean and generous, affectionate and cold, private despite the relish of his fame. In his later years he professed communism, yet in O'Brian's view retained to the end of his life a residual Catholic outlook. Not that such matters were allowed to interfere with his vigorous sensuality. Sex and money, eating and drinking, friends and quarrels, comedies and tragedies, suicides and wars tumble one another in the vast chaos of his experience. he was a man almost as lonely as the sun, but one who glowed with much the same fierce, burning life. It is with that impression of its subject that this book leaves its readers.

Patrick O'Brian

(Author)

View Author's Page

Richard Patrick Russ, known as Patrick O'Brian, was a British writer and translator born in Buckinghamshire (not in Ireland, as he claimed) on December 12, 1914, and who died on January 2, 2000 in Dublin, Ireland

Son of a doctor of German origin and an Englishwoman of Irish descent, he was the eighth of a family of nine children. He published his first novel in 1930, when he was a teenager, but did not return to write this genre —although he did publish several stories, biographies, and children's books— until about forty years later, an American publisher suggested he write a work in the line of the late Cecil Scott Forrester, maintaining the genre of the "naval epic" that had made him famous

Following the editor's advice, O'Brian wrote the famous characters Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, who thrived in the environment of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Master and Commander, the first title in the series they starred in, led to the successful film adaptation Master and Commander, which featured Russell Crowe

O'Brian was an excellent translator of French, as evidenced by his translations of Papillon by Henri Charrière and several works by Simone de Beauvoir. A writer jealous of his private life, little was known about his life until the publication of his biography by his stepson, Nikolai Tolstoy.

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