A Sum of Destructions

In this book, Natasha Staller closely examines for the first time the complex and intricate dialogue between Picasso and the multiple cultures of his early life. Staller argues that to a degree never before imagined Picasso's revolutionary Cubism was saturated with his past - inspired in part by competing and colliding images, myths, and ideas from a series of cultural legacies. She tracks Picasso on his odyssey through cultures: from Malaga, where he spent his first ten years, to La Coruna, Barcelona, and finally to Paris, where he moved as a young man. She contends that Picasso's most fundamental ideas were all formed in Malaga, and that his earliest surviving works reveal particular ways of imagining the world that would continue all his life and would decisively inform the invention of Cubism. Yet Cubism could not have been invented had he not moved to Paris. Each culture became a prism through which he viewed the next. In each case he actively transformed what he found.