Je Suis Le Cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso (1986) is a remarkable facsimile reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s private sketchbooks, offering an intimate glimpse into the artist’s creative process. Edited by Arnold Glimcher and published by The Atlantic Monthly Press, this lavish volume meticulously replicates five of Picasso’s early 20th-century notebooks, featuring studies for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Cubist experiments, and playful figurative sketches that reveal his fluid transition between styles.
The book’s cloth-bound, folio-sized format mirrors the original sketchbooks, with annotations by Glimcher contextualizing Picasso’s lines and erasures. A must-have for Picasso scholars, it bridges the gap between preparatory doodles and masterpieces, proving that “I am the notebook” (Je suis le cahier)—the artist’s essence lives in these raw, unfiltered pages.
