In this original and innovative book, Christopher Green explores how Pablo Picasso, through the manipulation of pictorial signs, explored ideas about the living and the dead. Oscillating between the animate and the inanimate, Picasso created objects that live, and figures that are as dead as objects.Covering the period from the creation of the Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 to the artist's association with the Surrealists in the early 1930s, the book offers a journey through Picasso's imagination and reveals--by way of Apollinaire, Breton, and Freud, among others--the ideas and reflections associated with life and death in his work.Published in association with the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, the book also includes an essay on Picasso's biomorphic motifs by the leading Spanish critic J. F. Yvars.