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Il libro nero
Author	Giovanni Papini
Language	Italian
Publisher	Vallecchi [it]
Publication date	1951
Publication place	Italy
Pages	395

Il libro nero. Nuovo diario di Gog (lit. 'The Black Book: Gog's New Diary') is a 1951 novel by the Italian writer Giovanni Papini. It is in the form of a diary with the views and adventures of the American millionaire Goggins, nicknamed Gog. It is the sequel to Papini's 1931 novel Gog.^[1] It was awarded the Premio Marzotto [it].^[2]

Picasso quotation

The book contains fictitious interviews with famous people including Adolf Hitler, Guglielmo Marconi, Frank Lloyd Wright, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso. A self-critical comment from the book's version of Picasso was quoted by several publications as genuine. In this comment, Picasso says: "When I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt and Goya were great painters; I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and has exhausted as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere." Life, having published the quotation as genuine, published a correction in 1969 where it attributed it to Il libro nero and wrote that it reflects Papini's view of contemporaneous culture rather than Picasso's.^[3]

References

^ Orlandi, Daniela (2007). "Giovanni Papini (1881–1946)". In Marrone, Gaetana (ed.). Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies: A–J. New York: Routledge. pp. 1346–1347. ISBN 978-1-57958-390-3.
^ Ridolfi, Roberto (1987). Vita di Giovanni Papini (in Italian). Rome: Ed. di Storia e Letteratura. p. 211.
^ "Apology for a False Picasso 'Quote'". Life. 17 January 1969. p. 18B.