Je suis le cahier: THE SKETCHBOOKS OF PICASSO edited by Arnold B. Glimcher and Marc Glimcher (Atlantic Monthly; $65; 360 pp.)

The first extensive publication on the subject of Picasso’s extraordinary and little-known visual diaries, these variously bound sketchbooks of different sizes contain some 7,000 pencil, ink, charcoal, crayon, ink marker, collage, and watercolor drawings, as well as revealing notations about Picasso’s acquaintances and some manuscript pages.

As this book informs us, between 1894, when he was 13, and 1967, six years before his death at the age of 92, Picasso filled at least 175 of these sketchbooks, which, characteristically, he dated carefully. He kept almost all of them. Most now belong to his living children, Maya, Claude, and Paloma, and to his living grandchildren, Marina and Bernard. Others are in the collection of the Musee Picasso in Paris. A few were dismantled and sold as separate drawings during Picasso’s lifetime and with his permission.

The book “Je suis le cahier” was created to accompany the fascinating and visually stunning exhibition of the same title mounted by the Pace Gallery in New York last summer to celebrate its 25th year in business. (Recently Pace has been the American dealer through which Claude, Paloma, and Bernard have annually sold a limited number of the works by Picasso that they inherited.) The Pace summer exhibition consisted of 45 of the sketchbooks, two belonging to Marina, most loaned by Claude, Paloma, and Bernard. None had been previously exhibited. This show is now touring North American and European museums and opens Dec. 16 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Not only should this exhibition not be missed, it should be returned to again and again. One reason is that those sketchbooks which cannot be safely disassembled and displayed as separate sheets will be turned on a regular basis in the course of the six weeks that the show is on view.

The book was edited by the organizers of the exhibition: Arnold Glimcher, director of the Pace Gallery, who wrote the preface, and his son, Marc. It contains essays by six American art historians who have published extensively on Picasso: E.A. Carmean, Robert Rosenblum, Theodore Reff, Rosalind E. Krauss, Sam Hunter, and Gert Schiff. Each wrote on one particular notebook. The book reproduces these six sketchbooks in full, along with useful reproductions of the paintings, drawings, collages, and stage sets to which the sketchbook pages discussed in each essay closely relate. These ancillary reproductions are aligned very near the relevant text, so arguments can be followed without a lot of flipping around.

Rosenblum’s and Krauss’ essays are particularly revealing, and Reff’s addresses the interesting matter of Picasso’s shuttling, apparently daily, between the sign language of synthetic Cubism and meticulously shaded naturalism, as if to demonstrate to himself, in the privacy of the sketchbooks, that conventions of illustrating a subject are just that, a system of representation chosen by the artist, not a kind of realism ordained by the Italian Renaissance.

Rosenblum discovers notations in one of the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” sketchbooks that suggest Picasso may have been stimulated to make his famous painting of the interior of a bordello by Degas’ monotypes on the same subject. Krauss argues that biographically loaded interpretations of Picasso’s work are problematic. She does this by proposing that his images in 1926, of his voluptuous young mistress, Marie Therese Walter, precede the date that he met her; that is, that his visual art preceded his life, and that therefore biographical readings are all wet. Yet these sketchbook pages and Krauss’ proposal make one wonder, in turn, if Picasso did not meet this teen-age model and friend a year or two before we have been told that he did. Paintings of 1925 suggest that this is possible, and that her mere 15 years then made her best unmentioned for a while.

In addition to the historians’ essays, the book has brief reminiscences by Claude Picasso and by his and Paloma’s mother, the painter Francoise Gilot, who lived with Picasso between 1943 and 1953 and wrote intelligently about the experience. The book also contains over 100 reproductions chosen from a chronological span of some of the other sketchbooks, which are not reproduced in full. Finally, it has a catalogue of the 175 known sketchbooks, with one reproduction of a drawing from each of these, to suggest that sketchbook’s predominant contents.

The book is thus not exactly an exhibition catalogue in the usual sense. For example, it does not record which 45 notebooks are in the exhibition, most likely because loans from the heirs were still being determined when the book went to press. Nor does it record the sizes of the drawings reproduced, only--in the catalogue--the sizes of the sketchbooks in which the drawings appear. Rather, the book is an anthology that introduces the public to a rich body of unfamiliar Picasso material, some of which has not been reproduced before, some of which is to be found in black and white, scattered through the 33-volume catalogue raisonne of Picasso’s work by Christian Zervos, and a little of which has been reproduced before in facsimiles of five or six of the 175 notebooks).

On one of the sketchbooks, Picasso penned the words Je suis le , “I am the,” before the printed word cahier , “notebook.” But this moment of whimsy was also a moment of truth, and the title is apt. For the general public “Je suis le cahier” provides a sumptuous, chronologically presented overview of Picasso’s successive styles as an immensely fecund genius of graphic art.

For scholars, the book is tantalizing, yet frustrating. One wishes immediately to have available the tool of facsimiles of all 175 notebooks. In some respects, for scholars, the book is annoying. On the one hand, to have for the first time an ordered list of the 175 extant sketchbooks and an idea, from the single reproduction from each, of the main contents, is very useful. On the other hand, this catalogue bills itself as a catalogue raisonne , but fails to mention, as any standard works catalogue does, who is the owner of each sketchbook.

Another awkwardness of the catalogue section is that it fails to indicate which drawings have already been reproduced in Zervos and which have not. Marc Glimcher estimates that less than 25% of the sketchbook materials have been reproduced previously anywhere and points out that those illustrated in black and white in Zervos are not captioned so that we may understand that they are from bound sketchbooks. I wish he had said so in the book itself. Still, there is so much food for thought here and the exhibition is so illuminating that it seems small-minded to carp.

Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of the flawed catalogue at the back of the book is the conspicuous omission of sketch- books from Picasso’s arguably most brilliant and inventive years, 1909 through 1911. We know that during this period of high analytic Cubism he drew constantly. Perhaps sketchbooks from this period will surface eventually. Meanwhile, enjoy the exhibition.