SKIRA Editore | Les Metamorphoses d'Ovide illustrated by Pablo Picasso
Les Métamorphoses d'Ovide (cover). © 2019 Skira Editore
LES MÉTAMORPHOSES D'OVIDE
ILLUSTRATED BY PABLO PICASSO
Published by Skira Editore
French edition
412 pages with 30 color etchings
Price: £220 / $300
For its 90th anniversary, Skira is publishing an anastaHc ediHon of its very first book: Ovide’s Les Métamorphoses.
In 1931, with the help of Jacqueline Apollinaire and on the advice of Pierre Matisse, the then twenty-five-year-old Albert Skira convinced Pablo Picasso to illustrate Ovid’s Metamorphoses with 30 etchings.
This exceptional edition, with a print run of 145 copies, brought together and revisited more than 250 Greek myths in 11,995 verses and 15 books. Printed on Picasso's 50th birthday, the art critic and art historian Christian Zervos (later the author of Picasso’s catalogue raisonné) labelled it as "an almost Doric beauty”.
A true "encyclopaedia of classical mythology", Ovide’s Les Métamorphoses are centred on 15 myths and consists of 412 pages, including engravings both alongside (15) and outside the text (15). Picasso’s etchings are of a rare homogeneity, made of pure outlines, and discreet eroticism. At the top of the chapters, etchings are freed from the constraints of the text and represent faces, studies of the nude and of ironic elliptic female bodies (27th etching).
This new edition, in the format 30.5 × 24 cm, offers (in agreement with the Picasso Estate) a slight variation from the original format. It is bound as the first edition of 1931 with paper coating and hot stamping. The book is contained within a box set that also includes an illustrated brochure on the birth and history of this book. The facsimile is perfect.
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