About the Book

The Picasso sketchbook featured here dates back to March 1923 and has never been seen before.

It was part of a cache of works stolen over decades by Picasso's electrician and only discovered when he and his wife tried to sell some pieces in 2020. A facsimilie of the sketchbook itself, bound in real linen cloth that has been specifically aged to match the original, is packaged in a clamshell box with an illustrated book that tells the story of the theft and the discovery and examines the sketches in detail relating them to several examples of Picasso's finished work.

About the Author

Gavin Parkinson was a BA student in Manchester, then completed his MA at The Courtauld in 1997, followed by a PhD in 2000. After lecturing at Birkbeck College and the University of Oxford he joined The Courtauld teaching staff as a Lecturer in 2008 and became a Senior Lecturer in 2014.

Gavin’s teaching and writing are concerned with European art and visual culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a special interest in French Surrealism. His books are: Futures of Surrealism: Myth, Science Fiction and Fantastic Art in France 1936-69 (Yale University Press, 2015); Surrealism, Art and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology (Yale University Press, 2008); and The Duchamp Book (Tate Publishing, 2008). He is just completing a book on the Surrealist reception of late nineteenth century art, entitled Enchanted Ground: Surrealist Appraisals of Fin de Siècle Painting.