When Pablo Picasso arrived in Paris in 1900, the 19-year-old was an unknown. The Spaniard makes modern art, but the world still gives his work the cold shoulder, and so the unemployed artist lives and paints together with other avant-gardists in a run-down house in Montmartre. Here he met his first muse and lover Fernande Olivier, became friends with companions such as Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire and Getrude Stein and gradually made a name for himself - until he shocked the whole of Paris in 1907 with ''Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'' and the Art revolutionizes.
Julie Birmant and Clément Oubrerie lightly link Picasso's flights of fancy and crises of meaning with the portrait of a flourishing era, including all its moments of light and shadow. The complete edition combines all four volumes in German for the first time.
