"Like no other artist, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) left his mark on the modern era with his exhaustive, protean body of work. The reception of his oeuvre is inseparably bound to his collectors in Basel, such as Raoul La Roche, Rudolf Staechelin, Karl Im Obersteg, and Maja Sacher-Stehlin, as well as to the Basel-based art historians Georg Schmidt and Christian Geelhaar, who recognized early on the key role he would play in twentieth-century art. This publication accompanies a large-scale retrospective of the artist's work, the first to unite the high-quality inventories of the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Fondation Beyeler with works from private collections in Basel. This makes it possible to see the astonishing correlations between the artist's various creative periods--from the Blue and Pink periods, Cubism, and the Surrealist-influenced works of the thirties to the art of the forties and fifties and the late works."--Publisher's website.