Pablo Picasso: 1881–1973

Carsten-Peter Warncke's Taschen survey remains the standard single-shelf account of Picasso: a chronological reading of the whole career, from the Barcelona years to the last paintings, at a scale most monographs cannot afford.

Edited by Ingo F. Walther and running to some 740 pages, the book was first issued in two volumes — The Works 1890–1936 and The Works 1937–1973 — and later reprinted by Taschen in single-volume form. Warncke moves period by period through the Blue and Rose paintings, the invention of Cubism with Braque, the neoclassical work of the 1920s, Guernica and the political pictures, the ceramics and sculpture, and the late variations on Velázquez, Delacroix and Manet, with biography and documentary photographs set alongside the plates.

Picasso (1881–1973) worked across painting, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics and stage design over seven decades, and the sheer spread of that output is what the book is built to accommodate. Warncke is a German art historian who has written on modern art extensively for the same publisher.