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Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Thomas Pynchon
Tristes Tropiques
John Weightman, Doreen Weightman, Patrick Wilcken, Claude Lévi-Strauss
Richard III
William Shakespeare
The Dwarf
Alexandra Dick, Pär Lagerkvist
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen, Cecil Day-Lewis
Labyrinths
Richard Wolin
Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery
Jill Dunkerton, Susan Foister, Dillian Gordon, Nicholas Penny
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
Hubert L. Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow
Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel
Steven Weisenburger

Picasso and Braque Pioneering Cubism

Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism - William Rubin Richardson's view that Braque and Picasso constructed Analytic Cubism in tandem, like two mountaineers roped to one another (Braque's famous image), flies in the face of the traditional view, which goes back to the writings and private comments of both Apollinaire and Salmon -- both of whom dismissed Braque as essentially a 'second', a 'corroborator', a 'fervent disciple' at best, "mediocre" (Apollinaire) at worst.

This, of course, was not true - for from 1908 till 1912 -- at almost every turn in Analytic Cubism -- it was, in fact, Braque who was out ahead and who led. Or as Robert Hughes puts it: Picasso cleared the ground, Braque built the palace (paraphrase).

This reevaluation of Braque was established by this volume, which is thus an important and seemingly decisive book.

This book is the catalogue of an exhibition put on by the MoMa in the late 1980's; it collects, and places side-by-side the works of Picasso and Braque (from 1906 till the outbreak of the War) in chronological sequence, by motif, by style -- and the point is, I think, proved beyond a doubt. The reproductions are beautiful, nearly 300 pages of full-page color prints.

Braque did not have the genius and virtuosity of Picasso - but like Cézanne, whom he deeply admired, he had the integrity and doggedness, an absolute commitment to the motif -- ("...., talent is out, all that matters is a confrontation with the motif"), that one associates with Cézanne. And he was, indeed, a great artist.

This book was pleasure to browse/read -- while there is some text, the book can be read entirely on the pictorial level, simply by flipping slowly through the prints one-by-one.