01 An Artist in Vogue
Picasso’s predilection for reading periodicals and comics dates to his childhood and seems to be strongly linked to the pleasure of combining texts and images. At the age of thirteen he began creating his own periodicals, such as ★Azul y Blanco★ (★Blue and White★, which recounted the news in La Coruña, where he lived at the time. Later, he developed a habit of drawing directly in books, sketching characters on pages torn from novels by Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert that echoed their content.
Adorned with fierce little figures, the May 1951 issue of ★Vogue Paris★ illustrates superbly the mechanisms of these re-readings through drawing. The kitsch photographs of brides promoting ready-to-wear outfits are here turned into absurd, grotesque, nightmarish images.