Villers | Picasso

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Villers | Picasso at Gagosian, Geneva, which traced the collaboration between Pablo Picasso and the photographer André Villers, as well as presented Villers’s most recent work. Gathering photographs, sculptures, and paintings, it established a fresh perspective on the dialogue between the two artists, exploring a unique occurrence in Picasso’s oeuvre, Villers being the only photographer whom he fully integrated into his creative process.

Over ten years beginning in 1953, Picasso and Villers sought to transcend the boundaries between photography and sculpture. Picasso made paper “negatives” that Villers then photographed and used to produce prints, photograms, interpretations, stagings, and transfers. In his later personal work, Villers made sculptures from paper and collaged fragments which he then staged and photographed in a further evolution of these collaborative mixed-media inventions.

The bilingual (English/French) book documents these projects in three sections—focusing on cutouts, sculptures and paintings, and photographs—and features a new essay by Anne Baldassari and the historical texts “Photobiography” by Villers and “Diurnes” by Jacques Prévert.