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The University of Southampton
Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art Design & Media

New Book Edited by Professor Jonathan Harris Examines ‘Political Picasso’

Published: 26 November 2013

Jonathan Harris’ new edited book on the work of Pablo Picasso has just been published by Liverpool University Press. "Picasso and the Politics of Visual Representation: War and Peace in the Era of the Cold War and Since" focuses on the lesser-known ‘political Picasso’ of the period after 1944.

In the decades after joining the French Communist Party in late 1944 at the end of World War Two, Picasso produced a body of work connected directly, if in complex and varied ways, to his left-wing political beliefs and continued affiliation to a Republican Spain destroyed by General Franco’s fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War.

Edited by Professor Harris with Richard Koeck, the book draws together dynamic scholars from Europe and the USA examining facets of this era and Picasso’s place within it in a variety of innovative ways developing art historical, critical and social-theoretical themes. All the contributing authors pose related questions concerned with the significance of Picasso’s political works today, and ask how images and personas of the artist have developed and been appropriated by many others with their own distinct political agendas. How might art today be ‘political,’ or not be capable of being political, in ways and with objectives that Picasso and those in his time in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s would have recognised?

For further information about the new book, see the Liverpool University Press Website

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