Pascal Bonafoux Books

Les portraits de Rembrandt first published in France by aEditions du Seuil, 2019--Colophon.

A volume dedicated to Pablo Picasso’s self-portraits from his earliest works to his final years, a number of which are published here for the first time. Pablo Picasso’s life and art has been depicted in monographs, biographies, and movies, but until now his self-portraits as a body of work have not received the focus they deserve. Picasso represented himself ceaselessly throughout his long career, whether in a dashed-off pencil sketch, as a flourish at the bottom of a letter, or on a giant painted canvas. At the suggestion of Picasso’s widow Jacqueline, the distinguished art historian Pascal Bonafoux began studying Picasso’s self-portraits more than forty years ago. This meticulously researched book presents the fruits of his decades-long project. From the first self-portrait attributed to Picasso in 1894, when he was a thirteen-year-old boy, until his final self- portrait in 1972, a year before his death, Bonafoux charts the evolution of the artist’s life and art. Here is Picasso as a student; as a young bohemian; as an impetuous artist in Paris; as harlequin; as lover, husband, and father; and finally, as an old man confronting his mortality. The book comprises approximately 170 drawings, paintings, and photographs, some from private collections and previously unpublished, bringing together for the first time the self-portraits of this genius of twentieth-century art.

You will join Velazquez in Venice as he examines paintings by Titian and Tintoretto on the advice of Rubens. You will meet Liszt, a Hungarian pianist who encounters Chopin and Berlioz in the Salons of Paris. You will understand the hidden meaning of popular subjects such as "Saint George and the Dragon, " the importance of Florentine art patrons in the 15th century, and the beginning of new movements such as Art Nouveau or Cubism. A list of the 300 most important museums with addresses and descriptions of their collections will give you direct access to the artworks and help you plan trips to Europe that are immersed in culture.

Through his intense vision Van Gogh was able to create paintings that speak directly to us all, and today this disturbed and rejected misfit is the most universally loved of all artists. The story of his thirty seven years of poverty, loneliness and failure is in fact a triumphant saga of absolute dedication and the final realization of genius. This illustrated volume in the hugely popular New Horizons series, includes the story of his life; his relationships with his brother Theo and contemporaries such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro and Gauguin; his descent into madness and his eventual suicide. As well as the many reproductions of paintings and drawings by Van Gogh and his contemporaries, extensive documentary evidence includes extracts from his letters, critical writings and documentary photographs.

Supremely successful at the beginning of his life; lonely, bankrupt and virtually ignored at its end, Rembrandt produced some of the most powerful and psychologically penetrating works in the whole of world art. Poverty, illness, the deaths of his wife, children and devoted mistress - nothing deflected him from his inner vision and his unique handling of which would change the course of painting for ever.