Lael Tucker Wertenbaker (1909–1997)

Even people with very little knowledge of art know the name of Picasso. As this author observes, Picasso’s career spanned the entire course of modern art, first joining it, then leading it.

Picasso’s personality, Wertenbaker avers, “was as many-faceted as his achievements.” Indeed, that’s what makes this illustrated biography so interesting.

Picasso was born in 1881 in Spain and lived to be 91. It was said he could draw before he could talk. His father recognized that his son was a prodigy, and both encouraged and disciplined him. By the time he was 14, he was a competent painter.

At 19, Picasso left home in search of new artistic frontiers, and before he was 25, the author tells us, “he had wrought his great natural abilities into a powerful, personal style - the first that could unmistakably be called ‘Picasso.’”

Numerous full-color plates in chronological order fill the book showing the changes in Picasso’s life and thus in his art. But he had some enduring themes - women, mothers with children, his home, and the history of art itself.

A chart at the end of the book shows other artists whose lives and work intersected with Picasso’s.

This volume of the Time-Life Library of Art makes a great introduction to the artist.… (more)

A touching and compassionate play, in which a well-to-do American couple living in France in 1954 must face issues of quality of life and right-to-die as the husband faces the fact that his cancer is terminal and will soon end him. Played by Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland on the stage, this is an intelligent and touching treatment of how a loving couple faces the end we all must, just with a bit more foreknowledge in their case. The wife's final words to her husband had me quietly weeping as I read. I think these issues were more taboo in those days, but it's still a potent punch of ideas and emotions.… (more)