Word: huffington
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...less to Nancy Reagan than meets the eye. Kitty Kelley is hardly the only slash-and-burn chronicler currently at work. Her smartest move has been to choose living victims for her killer bios; speaking ill of the dead (Albert Goldman on Elvis and John Lennon, Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington on Pablo Picasso) is profitable but a tad less sensational. And the instant renown achieved by Kelley's Nancy does not really signal the end of civilization as we have known it. Good, balanced, substantial biographies about controversial figures continue to appear and win notice. Last week Jackson Pollock: An American...
...much guff. There have been hundreds of books about Picasso, but no really satisfactory biography until now. Those written in English tended to be useful but overadoring, like the 1958 life by his close friend Roland Penrose; or deplorably ignorant, like Picasso: Creator and Destroyer (1988), by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington. To draw Picasso whole, in full context, is a daunting task; but now that the first of John Richardson's four volumes is out, one sees that it could indeed be done...
...problematic aspects of her analysis are compounded by the breathless tone which infects the book. The author seems stunned to realize that Picasso ate, slept, drank, defecated, etc. And when she reveals that Picasso actually did mean and petty things, Huffington writes with a disdain and lack of comprehension that only reveal how deeply she still sees the master artist as a mythic figure...
Picasso's life "was, in a very real sense, the twentieth century's own autobiography," Huffington writes at one point. That statement can be seen as the epigraph for the book's failings, as well as for the man it seeks to portray, because the book embraces wholeheartedly the narrow commonplaces which comprise bestselling books today. If there are no heroes, only 15-minute celebrities, then the People magazine school of biography is appropriate for cultural figures...
...there is still an Art that transcends sexual foibles and the quirks of personality, then Huffington's book--and her approach to the subject--is a failure. Her critique of Picasso the publicity seeker and sadist makes no contribution to our understanding of the artist at work and very little to our understanding of the artist at play...