Picasso and his Dogs

In 1933, Virginia Woolf wrote a biography of the poet Elisabeth Barret Browning, narrated in the first person by her cocker spaniel, Flush. In 1936, to write her memoirs, All the dogs of my life, Elisabeth von Arnim chose to recount the lives of the 14 dogs that had accompanied her, from her childhood in Prussia at the end of the 19th century to her retirement on the Côte d'Azur. In 1957, the dachshund Lump arrived at Pablo Picasso's home, where he lived until 1973. His intimate family life, with Jacqueline, Claude and Paloma, with the animals that populate the villa La Californie, but also his artistic life, as we find him even in the variations on Velasquez's Meninas. David Douglas Duncan, the friend who gave Lump to Picasso, brings together the stories of this life in Picasso and Lump, a Dachshund Odyssey.

Inspired by these references, this new collection (whose title is a nod to Picasso and Lump) takes a look at the life and work of the great artists and art lovers of the 20th and 21st centuries from the angle of their relationship with the 'dogs of their lives'. These light-hearted, erudite books, written by leading specialists, combine personal accounts and stories, quotations, archive photographs and reproductions of works of art to offer a unique approach, combining sensitivity and humour, to the life and work of Pablo Picasso, Joan Mitchell, Andy Warhol, Francis Picabia, Pierre Bonnard, David Hockney, William Wegman, Gertrude Stein, Peggy Guggenheim, Yves Saint Laurent and more.