Picasso. From the ballets to drama (1917-1926)

It is common knowledge that there are two key works in Picasso's oeuvre: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Gernika (1937). How-ever, if we were asked to state which was the richest, most diverse, in short, most con-trasting, period in his output, this would undoubtedly be the ten years from 1917 to 1926, the subject of this book, which follows on from Picasso, the Early Years 1881-1907 and Picasso Cubism 1907-1917, by the same author.
While the preceding Blue Period, Rose Period, and Cubism were more or less successive, during this decade the different phases were simultaneous and concomitant, overlapping and superimposing themselves on each other.
In the space of a few days - or a few hours -, Picasso was capable of producing a theatre set, a number of figurative portraits, some cubist paintings, and others of an archaic Hellenism or surrealist avant la lettre, using whatever medium he required: drawing, engraving, or sculpture. Picasso radically changed the concept of identity, through not only his models but also, and above all, through himself, his own action, his work.
Picasso tells us that man is contradictory, and this characteristic, instead of being a negative trait, becomes a positive affirmation. As the reader will see on these pages, through his art Picasso led the greatest conceptual revolution ever concerning human identity.