As he magnificently combines meticulous scholarship with irresistible narrative appeal, Richardson draws on his close friendship with Picasso, his own diaries, the collaboration of Picasso's widow Jacqueline, and unprecedented access to Picasso's studio and papers to arrive at a profound understanding of the artist and his work. 800 photos.
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About the Author
John Richardson is the author of a memoir, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice; an essay collection, Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters; and books on Manet and Braque. He has written for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. He was instrumental in setting up Christie’s in the United States. In 1993 he was made a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In 1995–96 he served as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University. He divides his time between Connecticut and New York City.
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Chapter 1: Rome and the Ballets Russes (1917)
Picasso's visit to Rome in February 1917 had originally been conceived as a wedding trip, but at the last moment his on-again off-again mistress, Irène Lagut, who had promised to marry him, changed her mind, as her predecessor, Gaby Lespinasse, had done the year before. Instead of Irène, Jean Cocteau accompanied him. In a vain attempt to set himself at the head of the avant-garde, this ambitious young poet had inveigled Picasso into collaborating with him on Parade: a gimmicky, quasi-modernist ballet about the efforts of a couple of shills to lure the public into their vaudeville theater by tantalizing them with samples of their acts. Cocteau had desperately wanted Diaghilev to stage this ballet in Paris. The meddlesome Polish hostess Misia Sert had tried to scupper the project. However, Picasso's Chilean protector and patron, Eugenia Errázuriz, had persuaded Diaghilev to agree, provided Picasso did the décor, Erik Satie the score, and Léonide Massine the choreography. Sets, costumes, and rehearsals were to be done in Rome, where Diaghilev had his wartime headquarters. Picasso's cubist followers were horrified that their avant-garde hero should desert them for anything as frivolous and modish as the Ballets Russes, but he ignored their complaints. After two and a half years of war, with its appalling death toll, its hardships and shortages, and above all the absence of his closest friends—particularly Braque and Apollinaire at the front—Picasso was elated at the prospect of leaving the bombardments and blackouts behind to spend a couple of months in the relative peace of Rome, which he had always wanted to visit. Besides working on Parade, he was determined to get married.
Picasso and Cocteau arrived in Rome on February 19, 1917, a day later than they had intended. Cocteau, who had forgotten to get a visa from the Italian embassy, had lied when telling him that no reservations were available. Diaghilev had booked them into the Grand Hotel de Russie on the corner of the Via del Babuino and the Piazza del Popolo. So that Picasso could work in peace on the costumes and sets for Parade, he had also arranged for him to have one of the coveted Patrizi studios, tucked away in a sprawling, unkempt garden off the Via Margutta. Although most of the artists are now gone, the Patrizi studios are still as idyllic as they were in 1917.
"I cannot forget Picasso's studio in Rome," Cocteau later wrote. "A small chest contained the maquette for Parade, with its houses, trees and shack. It was there that Picasso did his designs for the Chinese Conjurer, the Managers, the American Girl, the Horse, which Anna de Noailles would compare to a laughing tree, and the Acrobats in blue tights, which would remind Marcel Proust of The Dioscuri."[1] From his window Picasso had a magnificent view of the sixteenth-century Villa Medici, seat of the French Academy, towering above the studio garden. As he well knew, the Academy had associations with some of his favorite artists. Velázquez had painted the garden; Ingres had spent four years there as a fellow at the outset of his career and, later, six years as director; Corot had also worked there and caught the golden light of Rome and the campagna, as no other painter had done.
"Rome seems made by [Corot]," Cocteau reported to his mother. "Picasso talks of nothing else but this master, who touches us much more than Italians hell bent on the grandiose!"[2] That Picasso infinitely preferred the informality of Corot's radiant views to the pomp and ceremony and baroque theatricality of so much Roman painting is confirmed by his sun-filled pointillistic watercolors of the Villa Medici's ochre façade—as original as anything he did in Rome.[3]
Diaghilev insisted that Picasso and Cocteau share his passion for the city. Sightseeing was compulsory that very first evening. Since there was no blackout as there was in Paris, they were able to see the Colosseum all lit up—"that enormous reservoir of the centuries," Cocteau said, "which one would like to see come alive, crowded with people and wild beasts and peanut vendors."[4] The following morning, Diaghilev picked them up in his car for another grand tour. In the evening he took them to the circus. "Sad but beautiful arena," Cocteau wrote his mother. "Misia Sert (or rather her double) performed on the tight rope. Diaghilev slept until woken with a start by an elephant putting its feet on his knees."[5]
When he arrived in Rome, Picasso was still suffering from chagrin d'amour. Eager to find a replacement for Irène Lagut, he had promptly fallen in love with one of Diaghilev's Russian dancers, the twenty-five-year-old Olga Khokhlova. Although he courted her assiduously and did a drawing of her, which he signed with his name in Cyrillic, Olga proved adamantly chaste. Chastity was a challenge that Picasso had seldom had to face. Both Diaghilev and Bakst warned him that a respectable Russian woman would not sacrifice her virginity unless assured of marriage. "Une russe on l'épouse," Diaghilev said. Olga personified this view. She was indeed respectable: the daughter of Stepan Vasilievich Khokhlov, who was not a general, as she claimed, but a colonel in the Corps of Engineers in charge of the railway system.[6] Olga had three brothers and a younger sister. They lived in St. Petersburg in a state-owned apartment on the Moika Canal. Around 1910, the colonel had been sent to the Kars region to oversee railroad construction, and the family had followed him there. Olga stayed behind. Egged on by a school friend's sister, Mathilda Konetskaya, who had joined the Diaghilev ballet after graduating from the Imperial Ballet School, she decided to become a dancer.
Olga had considerable talent. Despite starting late and studying briefly at a St. Petersburg ballet school,[7] she managed to get auditioned by Diaghilev. The Ballets Russes was having difficulty prying dancers loose from the state-run theaters and was desperate for recruits. A committee consisting of Nijinsky and the greatest of classical ballet masters, Enrico Cecchetti, as well as Diaghilev—a trio described by another dancer as more terrifying than any first- night audience—put Olga through her paces and accepted her. Intelligence and diligence compensated for lack of experience. Nijinsky was sufficiently impressed to pick her out of the corps de ballet.
Léonide Massine, who had taken Nijinsky's place in Diaghilev's company as well as in his heart, had chosen Olga to play the role of Dorotea in Les Femmes de bonne humeur, an adaptation of a comedy by the eighteenth-century playwright Goldoni, with sets by Léon Bakst and a heavily arranged score after Scarlatti. It was at a rehearsal for this ballet, which would have its premiere in Rome the following month, that Picasso spotted Olga and immediately set about courting her. To familiarize himself with the techniques of theatrical décor as well as watch his new love at work, he helped Carlo Socrate (the scene painter who would work on Parade) execute Bakst's scenery. So that he could join Olga backstage, Picasso even helped the stagehands at the ballet's premiere.[8] Eighteen months later he would marry her.
Compared to her predecessors—Bohemian models Picasso had lived with in Montmartre or Montparnasse—Olga was very much a lady, not, however, the noblewoman biographers have assumed her to be.[9] She came from much the same professional class as Picasso's family. Don José, Picasso's father, may have been a very unsuccessful painter, but his brothers included a diplomat, a revered prelate, and a successful doctor, who had married the daughter of a Malagueño marquis. One of Picasso's mother's first cousins was a general—more celebrated than Olga's parent, also the real thing. Indeed, it may have been Olga's lack of blue blood that made her so anxious to become a grande dame and bring up her son like a little prince. Arthur Rubinstein, the pianist, who had met Olga in 1916 when the ballet visited San Sebastián, remembered her as "a stupid Russian who liked to brag about her father, who she pretended was a colonel in the Tsar's own regiment. The other dancers assured me that he was only a sergeant."[10] This was an exaggeration, but Olga's pretensions were resented by other members of the company.
Ten years younger than Picasso, Olga had fine regular features, dark reddish hair, green eyes, a small, lithe, dancer's body, and a look of wistful, Slavic melancholy that accorded with the romanticism of classic Russian ballet. Formal photographs reveal Olga to have been a beauty—usually an unsmiling one—although in early snapshots of her with Picasso and Cocteau in Rome, she is actually grinning. Later, she plays up to him, dances for him, takes on different personalities, which might explain the widely varying reactions to her. The celebrated ballerina Alexandra Danilova declared that Olga "was nothing—nice but nothing. We couldn't discover what Picasso saw in her."[11] A Soviet ballet historian, the late Genya Smakov, found references to her in an unpublished memoir by someone working for Diaghilev, where she is said to have been "neurotic."[12] On the other hand, Lydia Lopokova—the most intelligent of Diaghilev's ballerinas—was Olga's best friend in the company.
Picasso fell for Olga's vulnerability. He sensed the victim within. She would have appealed to his possessiveness and protectiveness especially when the Russian Revolution cut her off from her family. Her vulnerability would likewise have appealed to Picasso's sadistic side. (The women in his life were expected to read the Marquis de Sade.) In the past year rejection by the two women he had hoped to marry had left him exceedingly vulnerable. Pica...
Picasso's visit to Rome in February 1917 had originally been conceived as a wedding trip, but at the last moment his on-again off-again mistress, Irène Lagut, who had promised to marry him, changed her mind, as her predecessor, Gaby Lespinasse, had done the year before. Instead of Irène, Jean Cocteau accompanied him. In a vain attempt to set himself at the head of the avant-garde, this ambitious young poet had inveigled Picasso into collaborating with him on Parade: a gimmicky, quasi-modernist ballet about the efforts of a couple of shills to lure the public into their vaudeville theater by tantalizing them with samples of their acts. Cocteau had desperately wanted Diaghilev to stage this ballet in Paris. The meddlesome Polish hostess Misia Sert had tried to scupper the project. However, Picasso's Chilean protector and patron, Eugenia Errázuriz, had persuaded Diaghilev to agree, provided Picasso did the décor, Erik Satie the score, and Léonide Massine the choreography. Sets, costumes, and rehearsals were to be done in Rome, where Diaghilev had his wartime headquarters. Picasso's cubist followers were horrified that their avant-garde hero should desert them for anything as frivolous and modish as the Ballets Russes, but he ignored their complaints. After two and a half years of war, with its appalling death toll, its hardships and shortages, and above all the absence of his closest friends—particularly Braque and Apollinaire at the front—Picasso was elated at the prospect of leaving the bombardments and blackouts behind to spend a couple of months in the relative peace of Rome, which he had always wanted to visit. Besides working on Parade, he was determined to get married.
Picasso and Cocteau arrived in Rome on February 19, 1917, a day later than they had intended. Cocteau, who had forgotten to get a visa from the Italian embassy, had lied when telling him that no reservations were available. Diaghilev had booked them into the Grand Hotel de Russie on the corner of the Via del Babuino and the Piazza del Popolo. So that Picasso could work in peace on the costumes and sets for Parade, he had also arranged for him to have one of the coveted Patrizi studios, tucked away in a sprawling, unkempt garden off the Via Margutta. Although most of the artists are now gone, the Patrizi studios are still as idyllic as they were in 1917.
"I cannot forget Picasso's studio in Rome," Cocteau later wrote. "A small chest contained the maquette for Parade, with its houses, trees and shack. It was there that Picasso did his designs for the Chinese Conjurer, the Managers, the American Girl, the Horse, which Anna de Noailles would compare to a laughing tree, and the Acrobats in blue tights, which would remind Marcel Proust of The Dioscuri."[1] From his window Picasso had a magnificent view of the sixteenth-century Villa Medici, seat of the French Academy, towering above the studio garden. As he well knew, the Academy had associations with some of his favorite artists. Velázquez had painted the garden; Ingres had spent four years there as a fellow at the outset of his career and, later, six years as director; Corot had also worked there and caught the golden light of Rome and the campagna, as no other painter had done.
"Rome seems made by [Corot]," Cocteau reported to his mother. "Picasso talks of nothing else but this master, who touches us much more than Italians hell bent on the grandiose!"[2] That Picasso infinitely preferred the informality of Corot's radiant views to the pomp and ceremony and baroque theatricality of so much Roman painting is confirmed by his sun-filled pointillistic watercolors of the Villa Medici's ochre façade—as original as anything he did in Rome.[3]
Diaghilev insisted that Picasso and Cocteau share his passion for the city. Sightseeing was compulsory that very first evening. Since there was no blackout as there was in Paris, they were able to see the Colosseum all lit up—"that enormous reservoir of the centuries," Cocteau said, "which one would like to see come alive, crowded with people and wild beasts and peanut vendors."[4] The following morning, Diaghilev picked them up in his car for another grand tour. In the evening he took them to the circus. "Sad but beautiful arena," Cocteau wrote his mother. "Misia Sert (or rather her double) performed on the tight rope. Diaghilev slept until woken with a start by an elephant putting its feet on his knees."[5]
When he arrived in Rome, Picasso was still suffering from chagrin d'amour. Eager to find a replacement for Irène Lagut, he had promptly fallen in love with one of Diaghilev's Russian dancers, the twenty-five-year-old Olga Khokhlova. Although he courted her assiduously and did a drawing of her, which he signed with his name in Cyrillic, Olga proved adamantly chaste. Chastity was a challenge that Picasso had seldom had to face. Both Diaghilev and Bakst warned him that a respectable Russian woman would not sacrifice her virginity unless assured of marriage. "Une russe on l'épouse," Diaghilev said. Olga personified this view. She was indeed respectable: the daughter of Stepan Vasilievich Khokhlov, who was not a general, as she claimed, but a colonel in the Corps of Engineers in charge of the railway system.[6] Olga had three brothers and a younger sister. They lived in St. Petersburg in a state-owned apartment on the Moika Canal. Around 1910, the colonel had been sent to the Kars region to oversee railroad construction, and the family had followed him there. Olga stayed behind. Egged on by a school friend's sister, Mathilda Konetskaya, who had joined the Diaghilev ballet after graduating from the Imperial Ballet School, she decided to become a dancer.
Olga had considerable talent. Despite starting late and studying briefly at a St. Petersburg ballet school,[7] she managed to get auditioned by Diaghilev. The Ballets Russes was having difficulty prying dancers loose from the state-run theaters and was desperate for recruits. A committee consisting of Nijinsky and the greatest of classical ballet masters, Enrico Cecchetti, as well as Diaghilev—a trio described by another dancer as more terrifying than any first- night audience—put Olga through her paces and accepted her. Intelligence and diligence compensated for lack of experience. Nijinsky was sufficiently impressed to pick her out of the corps de ballet.
Léonide Massine, who had taken Nijinsky's place in Diaghilev's company as well as in his heart, had chosen Olga to play the role of Dorotea in Les Femmes de bonne humeur, an adaptation of a comedy by the eighteenth-century playwright Goldoni, with sets by Léon Bakst and a heavily arranged score after Scarlatti. It was at a rehearsal for this ballet, which would have its premiere in Rome the following month, that Picasso spotted Olga and immediately set about courting her. To familiarize himself with the techniques of theatrical décor as well as watch his new love at work, he helped Carlo Socrate (the scene painter who would work on Parade) execute Bakst's scenery. So that he could join Olga backstage, Picasso even helped the stagehands at the ballet's premiere.[8] Eighteen months later he would marry her.
Compared to her predecessors—Bohemian models Picasso had lived with in Montmartre or Montparnasse—Olga was very much a lady, not, however, the noblewoman biographers have assumed her to be.[9] She came from much the same professional class as Picasso's family. Don José, Picasso's father, may have been a very unsuccessful painter, but his brothers included a diplomat, a revered prelate, and a successful doctor, who had married the daughter of a Malagueño marquis. One of Picasso's mother's first cousins was a general—more celebrated than Olga's parent, also the real thing. Indeed, it may have been Olga's lack of blue blood that made her so anxious to become a grande dame and bring up her son like a little prince. Arthur Rubinstein, the pianist, who had met Olga in 1916 when the ballet visited San Sebastián, remembered her as "a stupid Russian who liked to brag about her father, who she pretended was a colonel in the Tsar's own regiment. The other dancers assured me that he was only a sergeant."[10] This was an exaggeration, but Olga's pretensions were resented by other members of the company.
Ten years younger than Picasso, Olga had fine regular features, dark reddish hair, green eyes, a small, lithe, dancer's body, and a look of wistful, Slavic melancholy that accorded with the romanticism of classic Russian ballet. Formal photographs reveal Olga to have been a beauty—usually an unsmiling one—although in early snapshots of her with Picasso and Cocteau in Rome, she is actually grinning. Later, she plays up to him, dances for him, takes on different personalities, which might explain the widely varying reactions to her. The celebrated ballerina Alexandra Danilova declared that Olga "was nothing—nice but nothing. We couldn't discover what Picasso saw in her."[11] A Soviet ballet historian, the late Genya Smakov, found references to her in an unpublished memoir by someone working for Diaghilev, where she is said to have been "neurotic."[12] On the other hand, Lydia Lopokova—the most intelligent of Diaghilev's ballerinas—was Olga's best friend in the company.
Picasso fell for Olga's vulnerability. He sensed the victim within. She would have appealed to his possessiveness and protectiveness especially when the Russian Revolution cut her off from her family. Her vulnerability would likewise have appealed to Picasso's sadistic side. (The women in his life were expected to read the Marquis de Sade.) In the past year rejection by the two women he had hoped to marry had left him exceedingly vulnerable. Pica...
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Where does genius come from? What are the motives? What are the stars that guide?
Picasso was arguably the most original and influential artist of the 20th century. In volume one of four planned volumes (three of which have been produced to date), John Richardson collaborates with Marilyn McCully to establish the detailed record of how Picasso developed as a man and an artist through the early Rose period. The book is made richer by Richardson's friendship with the artist and his access to Picasso's memories of key events. But he doesn't slavishly accept Picasso's version (except in damning Matisse as inferior to Picasso) but rather checks out the different versions and picks what seems to make the most sense.
Picasso's fanatic desire to succeed was fueled in part by his contempt for his father's failed career as an artist and his father's views that Picasso should follow in his footsteps. Picasso also needed to be treated as special, more than most of us. Groveling before exploitive dealers built a lifelong passion to be in charge. Picasso also knew that Paris was where he had to shine and suffered greatly to make his success there. His struggles will impress you.
Where the book is unequaled in my experience is in tracking down the sources of Picasso's images, gestures, styles, and innovations. The book is filled with black and white images from the works of other artists, Picasso's notebooks, photographs of the scenes and subjects, and related works that Picasso did. From these, you get a better sense of Picasso as a synthesizer of styles and modes.
In closely examining Picasso's work from these years, it's easy to develop superficial impressions of what sort of man did those paintings. For instance, the paintings of women show someone who feels compelled to alternately adore and dominate women . . . especially sexually. Learning later that he locked his mistress into the studio even on the hottest days when he left adds to that impression.
The book provides other powerful insights of this sort by relating the heavy use of opium by Picasso and his circle of artist friends during the Blue period. A lot of the models seem stoned in those paintings. Could it be that they were? Picasso loved to paint the circus performers and one of his first mistresses was one. Could it be that those performers are really emotional self-portraits? The book isn't clear on that point, but the possibility of the interpretation will occur to you.
A few central mysteries are left undeveloped. Why did Picasso stick so long with styles that he later abandoned and which didn't sell well when he was very poor? Picasso admitted to Richardson that the Blue and Rose periods had been mistakes. Why did Picasso slow down his production at times when he had contracts and shows upcoming? How did Picasso incorporate his love for poetry into his paintings?
At times Richardson is over the top in his fawning. Here's an example. Picasso is described as clearly one of the great poets of the 20th century, but Richardson doesn't reveal any evidence . . . nor was Picasso doing any poetry writing at the time of this volume. I suspect that the fawning was the price of admission for his access which rewards us in other ways.
Ultimately, the book's main weakness is that the images are not in color. Fortunately, color is less important to Picasso's work during this period than in later periods. Perhaps there will be another edition at some point that will bring the full dimensions of the work to bear at least for the masterpieces.
Enjoy your immersion in Picasso's chaotic world.
Picasso was arguably the most original and influential artist of the 20th century. In volume one of four planned volumes (three of which have been produced to date), John Richardson collaborates with Marilyn McCully to establish the detailed record of how Picasso developed as a man and an artist through the early Rose period. The book is made richer by Richardson's friendship with the artist and his access to Picasso's memories of key events. But he doesn't slavishly accept Picasso's version (except in damning Matisse as inferior to Picasso) but rather checks out the different versions and picks what seems to make the most sense.
Picasso's fanatic desire to succeed was fueled in part by his contempt for his father's failed career as an artist and his father's views that Picasso should follow in his footsteps. Picasso also needed to be treated as special, more than most of us. Groveling before exploitive dealers built a lifelong passion to be in charge. Picasso also knew that Paris was where he had to shine and suffered greatly to make his success there. His struggles will impress you.
Where the book is unequaled in my experience is in tracking down the sources of Picasso's images, gestures, styles, and innovations. The book is filled with black and white images from the works of other artists, Picasso's notebooks, photographs of the scenes and subjects, and related works that Picasso did. From these, you get a better sense of Picasso as a synthesizer of styles and modes.
In closely examining Picasso's work from these years, it's easy to develop superficial impressions of what sort of man did those paintings. For instance, the paintings of women show someone who feels compelled to alternately adore and dominate women . . . especially sexually. Learning later that he locked his mistress into the studio even on the hottest days when he left adds to that impression.
The book provides other powerful insights of this sort by relating the heavy use of opium by Picasso and his circle of artist friends during the Blue period. A lot of the models seem stoned in those paintings. Could it be that they were? Picasso loved to paint the circus performers and one of his first mistresses was one. Could it be that those performers are really emotional self-portraits? The book isn't clear on that point, but the possibility of the interpretation will occur to you.
A few central mysteries are left undeveloped. Why did Picasso stick so long with styles that he later abandoned and which didn't sell well when he was very poor? Picasso admitted to Richardson that the Blue and Rose periods had been mistakes. Why did Picasso slow down his production at times when he had contracts and shows upcoming? How did Picasso incorporate his love for poetry into his paintings?
At times Richardson is over the top in his fawning. Here's an example. Picasso is described as clearly one of the great poets of the 20th century, but Richardson doesn't reveal any evidence . . . nor was Picasso doing any poetry writing at the time of this volume. I suspect that the fawning was the price of admission for his access which rewards us in other ways.
Ultimately, the book's main weakness is that the images are not in color. Fortunately, color is less important to Picasso's work during this period than in later periods. Perhaps there will be another edition at some point that will bring the full dimensions of the work to bear at least for the masterpieces.
Enjoy your immersion in Picasso's chaotic world.
22 of 28 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
John Richardson's Magisterial Biography of Painter-Genius Picasso begins in Malaga in 1881
December 14, 2007
Format:Paperback
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was born to a mediocre painter and his good wife Maria on October 25, 1881. His family was poor but well connected. One uncle was a priest; another a prominent medical doctor. Picasso's father was easygoing eking out a living as an art teacher. When Pablo was a boy the family moved to Barcelona where his father taught in an art school. His mother was beloved of Pablo who had her tenacity of character and eager desire to learn. His younger sister Conchita died in childhood and he was close to his remaining sister throughout their long lives.
Pablo loved to paint from birth! He did not like formal schooling. He did attend the art school in Madrid but grew bored and left. As a teen he was wild and enjoyed chasing girls and hanging around with his bohemian chums. In these early years Pablo developed his routine throughout life: hard work, lots of sex (often in brothels!and smoking. Picasso drank very little and never had an alcohol problem.
As a young man he made three trips to Paris finally staying for good in the City of Lights on his fourth trip. He became friendly with several artists and writers most notablly the poet Apollinaire. His first true love was Olive Ferdinand a fetching Parisian who was also a minor painter.
Picasso had countless mistresses.
During these early years he went through his "Blue Period" in which he portrayed tragic and erotic figures in gloomy and sad modes. He later entered the "Rose Period" of colorful harlequins, clowns and street folks. He also enjoyed sculpture. His work began to sell.
Instrumental in his success were the dealers he relied upon to majrket his avant garde art. Among the influential people who bought his paintings were the American expatriots Leo and Gertrude Stein. Picasso was popular with Russian buyers. He preferred private sales rather than exhibiting his art alongside other salon artists. It was during these years he produced such masterpieces as "La Vie" "Old Man with a Guitar" and several works portraying androgynous bathers. As the book ends he is on the verge of moving into cubism along with fellow painter Braque.
Richardson does a good job of keeping his text balanced between sapient art assessments and Picasso's personal life. The crammed text is filled with such characters as the Steins, Matisse and the fetching Olive
Ferdinand. We see how Picasso was influenced by such masters from the past as: Ingres, Cezanne, Velasquez and El Greco. Richardson is insistent that we see Picasso as a Spanish artist heavily influenced by his Andalusian roots and the luminaries of Spanish art.
The book is well illustrated with hundreds of black and white photos of Picasso's works and snapshots taken of Picasso and friends. Richardson knew Picasso in his old age and is a brilliant critic of his work.
What kind of man was Picasso? He once told an interviewer "Truth is false!" In other words he was a paradox. He could be kind or cruel. He could abuse lovers forcing them into unnatural sex acts or he could be a gentle lover. He loved and hated Spain. He was apolitical at this early juncture of his career. Picasso hated pretense and liked common people.
He is complex and unique in art history as a protean master of many different types of art. This is the best biography ever written of Picasso and is the first of the four volumes to be published on a 2oth century art icon. Essential.
Pablo loved to paint from birth! He did not like formal schooling. He did attend the art school in Madrid but grew bored and left. As a teen he was wild and enjoyed chasing girls and hanging around with his bohemian chums. In these early years Pablo developed his routine throughout life: hard work, lots of sex (often in brothels!and smoking. Picasso drank very little and never had an alcohol problem.
As a young man he made three trips to Paris finally staying for good in the City of Lights on his fourth trip. He became friendly with several artists and writers most notablly the poet Apollinaire. His first true love was Olive Ferdinand a fetching Parisian who was also a minor painter.
Picasso had countless mistresses.
During these early years he went through his "Blue Period" in which he portrayed tragic and erotic figures in gloomy and sad modes. He later entered the "Rose Period" of colorful harlequins, clowns and street folks. He also enjoyed sculpture. His work began to sell.
Instrumental in his success were the dealers he relied upon to majrket his avant garde art. Among the influential people who bought his paintings were the American expatriots Leo and Gertrude Stein. Picasso was popular with Russian buyers. He preferred private sales rather than exhibiting his art alongside other salon artists. It was during these years he produced such masterpieces as "La Vie" "Old Man with a Guitar" and several works portraying androgynous bathers. As the book ends he is on the verge of moving into cubism along with fellow painter Braque.
Richardson does a good job of keeping his text balanced between sapient art assessments and Picasso's personal life. The crammed text is filled with such characters as the Steins, Matisse and the fetching Olive
Ferdinand. We see how Picasso was influenced by such masters from the past as: Ingres, Cezanne, Velasquez and El Greco. Richardson is insistent that we see Picasso as a Spanish artist heavily influenced by his Andalusian roots and the luminaries of Spanish art.
The book is well illustrated with hundreds of black and white photos of Picasso's works and snapshots taken of Picasso and friends. Richardson knew Picasso in his old age and is a brilliant critic of his work.
What kind of man was Picasso? He once told an interviewer "Truth is false!" In other words he was a paradox. He could be kind or cruel. He could abuse lovers forcing them into unnatural sex acts or he could be a gentle lover. He loved and hated Spain. He was apolitical at this early juncture of his career. Picasso hated pretense and liked common people.
He is complex and unique in art history as a protean master of many different types of art. This is the best biography ever written of Picasso and is the first of the four volumes to be published on a 2oth century art icon. Essential.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Great work, done by a real scholar, beautifully written, as fascinating as a novel. Keeps away from myths and tales, impressively documented, meticulously illustrated (too bad it is not in color).
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Published 4 months ago by Andrew Collier
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Good Introduction to Picasso
This book represents my first true exposure to the life of Picasso (birth to 1906, that is). I went to the Picasso Museum in Barcelona two years ago, and even though the art is... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Christopher Alexander
5.0 out of 5 stars
Love it and reread it.
Like "Finnegans Wake,"
I love to read this book to the end,
only to start again and again. Read more
I love to read this book to the end,
only to start again and again. Read more
Published 15 months ago by Ricardo Mena Cuevas
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Study in Greatness
This first part to three part series Mr. Richardson has written on Picasso is a preview of the greatness of the volumes to come. Mr. Read more
Published on January 30, 2010 by Elio Lopez
5.0 out of 5 stars
The definitive Picasso biography
The first volume of John Richardson's monumental Life of Picasso (so far, three volumes have been published), this book is a thoroughly documented and elegantly written account of... Read more
Published on May 10, 2009 by Reich Claude
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