by Thomas Amato (Author)
In 1915, a former Spanish member of the French Foreign Legion named Bianco seeks out a painting by his old friend Pablo Picasso. The day before he left for the trenches of Champagne, Bianco had seen Pablo's preparatory drawing, a picture of two men, one in a top hat and carrying a walking stick and the other wearing a tuxedo with a shirt bib. Pablo called it 'Two Dancers.' Having been gassed at Champagne and invalided out of the war and upon his recovery, Bianco wanted to know what had happened to Pablo's intriguing picture. A dealer had purchased the picture; yet, when Bianco goes to the gallery to look at it, Pablo had transformed from 'Two Dancers' into a 'Harlequin.'In his search to understand the meaning of the transformation and this new disturbing painting of a clown, Bianco takes the reader back to his own and Pablo's early lives and their experiences with love, death, and grief.Bianco wants the reader to reflect on how these existential experiences can change not only a person's way of understanding his life but also the way in which an artist approaches and creates his works. Picasso called his 'Harlequin' from 1915 the best painting he ever created.The book is full of paintings, drawings, and photos that depict the art and times in Spain and France towards the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.