US $ 65
UK £ 45

January 2011
HARDCOVER
Museum Publication


ISBN 13: 978-1-55595-360-7
ISBN: 1-55595-360-3
176 pages
9 x 10 in.
23 x 25 cm
145 color plates

♦ Comprised of paintings, drawings, prints, illustrated books, objects, and period photographs

♦ Includes a large number of works from private collections that have rarely been exhibited

♦ Paintings are paired with period photographs of Málaga, Paris, and Barcelona by Alfred Steiglitz and Brassai

The horse was a constant point of reference in the work of Picasso. Born and raised during the last moment of the age of the horse in Western civilization, Picasso incorporated the animal as a motif in his work more and more as his career progressed.

Picasso liked all horses without exception, and they were all appealing as he depicted them in his work, whether circus horses, children’s toys, carthorses, idealized classical horses, racehorses, or funeral horses. As author Dominique Dupuis-Labbé writes, “aside from works devoted to the women he loved, Picasso never better celebrated the fusion of emotion and creation than when he focused on the subject of the horse.”

In this collection of more than 50 works of art, Picasso’s impressions of the horse are brought together for the first time to tell a story of a world now almost forgotten where the horse was part of daily life.

From his earliest attempts at visual expressions as a 10-year-old boy visiting the bullfights at La Malagueta through his career that took him to Paris, Barcelona, and Málaga, presented together allows us to appreciate the rich and wide-ranging symbolic significance of the animal in the artist’s work, as well as the variety of techniques that he used over his career to depict it.