Word: richardson
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first volume of John Richardson's biography of Pablo Picasso, published in 1991, took the artist from birth to the brink of a masterpiece. In the second volume, A Life of Picasso: 1907-1917 (Random House; 500 pages; $55), Richardson begins with the painting that revolutionized 20th century art and goes on to portray the most productive and aesthetically innovative decade of his subject's life. Reading this story is akin to being allowed behind the scenes at an apotheosis...
...Richardson's account of the origin and initial responses to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is a masterful combination of narrative and art criticism. He traces Picasso's inspiration back to an 1863 essay by Charles Baudelaire in which the French poet declared, somewhat arbitrarily, that carriages in the Bois de Boulogne and brothels were the two acceptable subjects for the "painter of modern life." The five female figures nakedly displaying themselves in Les Demoiselles are fairly obviously in a brothel, but Picasso, characteristically, was not content simply to do something that others had done before...
...Richardson is particularly informative on this movement, which Picasso and the slightly younger painter Georges Braque co-invented. "Henceforth," Richardson writes, "everything had to be tactile and palpable, not least space. Palpability made for reality, and it was the real rather than the realistic that Picasso was out to capture. A cup or a jug or a pair of binoculars should not be a copy of the real thing, it need not even look like the real thing; it simply had to be as real as the real thing...
Cubism could not contain Picasso's restless energies for more than a handful of years, and the latter part of Richardson's second volume shows the artist moving toward a mining of classical images for his own work, trying, as always, "to cannibalize the art of the past and remake it in his own image...
...Richardson said the department wanted to conduct the survey as a way of getting student feedback...