45 PICASSO SKETCHBOOKS DUE HERE

The County Museum of Art will be the first American museum to show 45 sketchbooks by Pablo Picasso that amazed even gimlet-eyed experts at their unveiling at New York’s Pace Gallery earlier this year.

Picasso was the most ferociously inventive of modern innovators. His sketchbooks, to be exhibited at the museum Dec. 16-Jan. 25, express the genesis of his ideas in everything from ordinary grocery lists to sketches for poetic Rose Period works and his 1906 Cubist bombshell “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” which definitively changed the direction of the history of art.

The exhibition is titled “Je Suis Le Cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso” and includes some 200 drawings done between 1900 and 1965. They are selected from a cache of 175 extant notebooks that enfold nearly 7,000 drawings.

Picasso helped invent the hallmark modern style of Cubism and virtually reinvented the art of the past, resurrecting everything from Cycladic Greek to tribal African art and European classicism.

“Picasso’s genius glows in these sketchbooks, revealing the depth and richness of his imagination,” museum director Earl A. Powell III said.

New York Times art critic John Russell said they show a “Godlike variety of ambition.”

The sketchbooks will be shown at London’s Royal Academy (Sept. 11-Nov. 15) before coming here and subsequently moving to San Francisco.

The exhibition, sponsored by American Express, will be accompanied by a catalogue raisonne that will include a preface by Claude Picasso, an essay by Francois Gilot and contributions by six prominent art historians--E. A. Carmean, Sam Hunter, Rosalind Krauss, Robert Rosenblum, Theodore Reff and Gert Schiff.