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Picasso the Foreigner by Annie Cohen-Solal
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Picasso the Foreigner

An Artist in France, 1900-1973

$31.49

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Narrator Carlotta Brentan

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Translator Sam Taylor
Length 19 hours 53 minutes
Language English
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Before Picasso became Picasso—the iconic artist now celebrated as one of France's leading figures—he was constantly surveilled by the police. Amidst political tensions in the spring of 1901, he was flagged as an anarchist by the security services. Though he soon became the leader of the cubist avant-garde, and became increasingly wealthy as his reputation grew worldwide, Picasso's art was largely excluded from public collections in France for the next four decades. In a country where the police and the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts represented two major pillars of the establishment at the time, Picasso faced a triple stigma—as a foreigner, a political radical, and an avant-garde artist.

In this groundbreaking narrative, Picasso emerges as an artist ahead of his time not only aesthetically but politically, one who ignored national modes in favor of contemporary cosmopolitan forms. Cohen-Solal reveals how, in a period encompassing the brutality of World War I, the Nazi occupation, and Cold War rivalries, Picasso strategized and fought to preserve his agency, eventually leaving Paris for good in 1955. The artist never became a citizen of France, yet he enriched and dynamized its culture like few other figures in the country's history. This book, for the first time, explains how.

Annie Cohen-Solal, a writer and social historian, is Distinguished Professor at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. She has taught in Berlin, Jerusalem, New York, and Paris, and served as the cultural counselor to the French embassy in the United States. Her books include biographies of Jean-Paul Sartre, Leo Castelli, and Mark Rothko, all of which have been widely translated. Picasso the Foreigner was awarded the 2021 Prix Femina Essai; an exhibition curated by Cohen-Solal and based on the research for the book appeared in Paris at the Museum of the History of Immigration, in partnership with the national Picasso Museum, in 2021.

Carlotta Brentan is a New York-based actor, producer, and award-winning audiobook narrator. In theater, Carlotta focuses on original play development, and has produced, directed, and performed in acclaimed world premieres at Cherry Lane, LaMaMa, and internationally. Behind the mic, Carlotta has voiced hundreds of national commercials, corporate videos, e-learning, dubbing, and audiobooks in multiple languages and accents. A multiple AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator specializing in YA with an edge, thrillers, and literary fiction, Carlotta has voiced New York Times and Audible bestselling audiobooks, as well as Reese Witherspoon Book Club picks by award-winning authors. Carlotta is a classically trained actor, graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and a bilingual speaker of English and Italian. In all her work-which also includes on-camera commercials and films-Carlotta aims to tell the stories of complex, introspective, enterprising characters on journeys of self-discovery.

Sam Taylor is an award-winning literary translator and novelist. He has translated more than sixty books from French, including Laurent Binet's HHhH, Leïla Slimani's The Perfect Nanny, and Maylis de Kerangal's The Heart.

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