Few artistic moments are as instantly recognisable as Pablo Picasso's Blue Period, and from it La Vie (Life) has emerged as the culminating masterpiece. This book not only examines La Vie's history and physical structure in unprecedented detail but also uses the painting as the touchstone for exploring a broad array of issues vital to modernist culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. Picasso and the Mysteries of Life uses new scientific studies of La Vie to examine the artist's working method and the painting's enigmatic subject. Author William H. Robinson reconstructs the relationship between the painting's complex symbolism and the process of its creation, and in so doing breaks new ground in understanding the sources of Picasso's fertile imagination and his relationship to contemporary artists. La Vie emerges as a pivotal turning point in Picasso's development into the most innovative and influential painter of our time. AUTHOR: William H. Robinson, curator of modern European art at Cleveland Museum of Art, has published extensively on subjects concerned with European and American art of the 19th and 20th centuries, including most recently Van Gogh Repetitions; Against the Grain: Modernism in the Midwest and Barcelon and Modernity: Picasso. Casso, Gaudi, Miro, Dali. SELLING POINTS: This new volume, the first in a series featuring masterworks from the Museum, offers a highly focused examination of La Vie, accompanied by a more expansive reading of its meaning in a broad cultural context La Vie (Life) is today recognised as Picasso's culminating masterpiece of the Blue Period and one of the signature paintings in the Cleveland Museum of Art's renowned collection Published on the occasion of the exhibition Picasso La Vie and the Mysteries of Life held at the Cleveland Museum of Art, December 2012 - April 2013 and then at the Picasso Museum, Barcelona, from October 2013 - January 2014 ILLUSTRATIONS: 200 colour