Secret Images: Picasso and the Japanese Erotic Print

A genuinely new argument about Picasso: that the shunga prints he kept privately all his life shaped the erotic drawing of his youth and returned, transformed, in the work of his last decade.

Published by Thames & Hudson with the Museu Picasso, Barcelona, the book reproduces more than twenty previously unpublished Japanese erotic prints from Picasso's own collection and sets them beside his drawings and paintings. Essays by Ricard Bru, Malén Gual, Hayakawa Monta and Diana Widmaier Picasso cover the ukiyo-e and shunga traditions, the spread of japonisme through the young Picasso's Barcelona and Paris circles, the provenance of his collection and its passage through that of Philippe Berthelot, and the specific line that runs from Hokusai's octopus to Picasso's own tentacular figures.

The volume accompanied the Museu Picasso exhibition of the same name and remains the fullest published account of Picasso's Japanese holdings, a part of his collecting largely absent from the standard literature. Irreverent drawings of his youth are followed through to the mature images of a man cast as both participant and voyeur.