| Il libro nero | |
| Author: | Giovanni Papini |
| Orig Lang Code: | it |
| Country: | Italy |
| Language: | Italian |
| Pub Date: | 1951 |
| Pages: | 395 |
Il libro nero. Nuovo diario di Gog 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 .[2]
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]