Word: picassos
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Over the years Picasso has been the subject of much penetrating scholarship, but also of too 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...
This is probably the last serious biography of Picasso that will be written by anyone who knew him well. Richardson, now 67, first met the artist when he was living in France in the early 1950s; their rapport lasted 10 years, and the young English art critic kept ample notes. With the assistance of art historian Marilyn McCully (whose speciality is turn-of-the-century Barcelona, where Picasso's talent was incubated), Richardson has mined a large seam of material. He was, for instance, the first biographer allowed to consult Picasso's own archives. He knows the work intimately...
...classic mold. The idea that an artist's work can be approached through the events of his life is disparaged by some academic critics. Certainly one learns little about some artists -- Braque, for instance, or even Matisse -- from the tenor of their day-to-day lives. But with Picasso, who viewed his art as a diary, the life is the best key to the work. And the work is suffused with the man's traits: his extreme machismo, his predatory eye (the Andalusian mirada fuerte, or gaze of power, which, as Richardson rightly argues, was one of Picasso's fetishes...
...narrative frame is short. It brings Picasso from childhood through the Blue and Rose periods, stopping in 1907 just as the 25-year-old artist was souping himself up (under the influence of El Greco) to produce what would turn out to be the emblematic radical painting of the century, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Richardson is a born storyteller, with a vivid sense of detail and character that enables him to deal with the large cast of players entangled in Picasso's early life, from obscure Catalan artists, shady French art dealers and questing Russian collectors to writers like Alfred...
Richardson's account of such figures has to be the most readable description of the avant-garde milieu of 1900s Paris since Roger Shattuck's classic work, The Banquet Years. But they are not there as mere background; their impact on Picasso, their role in the formation of his ideas and imagery, is carefully assessed. One sees, for instance, what Picasso's work got from his "odd couple" friendship with his diametric opposite, the mercurial, spiritually obsessed Jewish homosexual Jacob: it was the vein of mystical imagery, the fascination with arcana, the tarot and the figure of the artist...