Word: richardson
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After one helter-skelter day of turbulent bicycle rides in the park, Roger and Pongo fall in love with Anita (Joely Richardson) and Perdita. They hold a double wedding and soon Perdita gives birth to 15 Dalmatian puppies. Daniels and Richardson play these potentially corny scenes with deadpan sincerity, making the parallels between canine and human love amusing rather than insipid. The always-reliable and lovable Joan Plowright also appears as the couple's nanny...
...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 knew Picasso in the last decade or so before the artist's death in 1973, and his account has a firsthand authority that subsequent biographies will lack. Those casually interested in Picasso may be advised to start their reading elsewhere; Richardson is not teaching Picasso 101 here but a postgraduate seminar that brilliantly corrects and fills in small details of a big picture that students are expected to know. It is a pleasure to see Picasso, his lovers and friends and rivals in the heady days when art mattered more than anything and greatness was only a passionate dream...