"This volume presents three of Meyer Schapiro's finest essays on Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Given that we esteem artists whose work epitomizes particular styles, how can we likewise value Picasso, an artist who demonstrates as wide a range of artistic styles as any in the history of art?

In His first essay, The Unity of Picasso's Art, Schapiro dismantles this apparent paradox by finding unity through hidden associations among seemingly disparate works and unsuspected ties to Picasso's personal experiences.".

"In Einstein and Cubism: Science and Art, Schapiro investigates potential connections between the two most important and radical innovations in science and art of the early twentieth century: Einstein's 1905 Special Theory of Relativity and Braque and Picasso's Cubism at the end of the same decade.".

"In the final essay, Schapiro shows that, although the greatest political work of art of the twentieth century, Guemica nevertheless embodies many of Picasso's artistic obsessions.

Painted in the course of one month (May 1937) to memorialize the bombing of a rural town during the Spanish Civil War, Guemica reflects Picasso's fantasies of himself and his family; it contains analogues of his own rage, anxiety, and feelings about death, as well as his awareness of the place of the work in the history of art."--BOOK JACKET.