2 Blurbs

ART SOURCES FOR PICASSO'S WORK

by John Warren Oakes

“With keen insight and a masterful grasp of the import of Picasso's artistic creation, John Warren Oakes accurately assesses multiple sources of inspiration for this twentieth-century giant of the art world. From seventeeenth-century masters to African sculpture and Picasso's European contemporaries, Oakes pins down the who and the where of origin. Most frequently, he cites Picasso's French near-contemporaries, Eugene Delacroix and Dominique Ingres, less

frequently, the earlier Domenikos El Greco and Francisco de Zurbaran of Spain.

For the intricate complexities of Picasso's major masterpieces, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Guernica, Oakes dubs him "the time-traveler," charting the course of his inspiration back to Iberian and Egyptian incarnations in sculpture and painting that express emotions ranging through sexuality, violence and horror. In his detailed comparison between Picasso's drawing Encre de Chine and Antonio Tempesta's engraving Victory of Joshua (1613), John Oakes cites sixteen incidents of direct inspiration; he finds fourteen such incidents from the same engraving in a painting by Ingres, entitled Venus Wounded by Diomedes, proving the prevalence at the time of the practice of adaptation from existing artworks. In turn, this work by Ingres played a dominant role in the creation of the immortal work Guernica, along with extensive possible associations traced to Rembrandt, Poussin, Durer, Bassano, Rubens, Delacroix, Raphael and Mantegna.

What a fascinating and complex network of ties and connections among major artists of several centuries has been revealed by John Warren Oakes!”

Louise Sheldon MacDonald

Louise Sheldon MacDonald was an art reviewer for Museum and Arts Washington and The World and I in Washington, D.C. She also wrote on the arts for the Baltimore Chronicle and the Baltimore Sun in Baltimore, Maryland. She served as an Associate Editor of Smithsonian magazine and as an Assistant Editor of LIFE magazine.

“The discoveries of sources for the work of Picasso place 
John Warren Oakes among the world's leading authorities on Picasso.”

Helen Dow, Ph.D. Professor of Art, 
University of Iowa School of Art and Art History  

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