Pablo Picasso is acknowledged as one of the greatest draftsmen of the 20th century. This book presents the dazzling development of the artist as a draftsman during the first 30 years of his career, from the precocious academic exercises of his youth to his radical innovations of cubism and collage.  A selection of more than seventy works on paper, with extended entries, highlights his stylistic experiments and techniques during this roughly thirty-year period, which begins and ends in a classical mode and encompasses his most radical innovations. The book's discussions of Picasso's style, sources, and techniques demonstrate how drawing served as an essential means of invention and discovery for the artist. This book brings to the fore Picasso's engagement with artists of the past and the ways in which he perpetuated, competed with, and ultimately reinvented the practices of his artistic mentors on his own terms. Through emulation, allusion, dissection, and outright hijacking, Picasso continued the grand tradition of drawing in a revitalized form. This study reveals the extent to which the artist relied on drawing as a means of synthesizing past and present, tradition and innovation, to give his own art a bold and vigorous expression.