Richardson draws on the same combination of lively writing, critical astuteness, exhaustive research, and personal experience which made a bestseller out of the first volume and vividly recreates the artist's life and work during the crucial decade ofa period during which Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented Cubism and to that extent engendered modernism.
Richardson has had unique access to untapped sources and unpublished material, By harnessing biography to art history, he has managed to crack the code of cubism more successfully than any of his predecessors, And by bringing a fresh light to bear on the artist's often too sensationalised private life, he has succeeded in coming up with a totally new view of this paradoxical man of his paradoxical work.
Never before has Picasso's prodigious technique, his incisive vision and not least his sardonic humour been analysed with such clarity, Wow, John Richardson writes the hell out of this book, and with exhaustive authority,
He details peccadilloes, cliques, and grudges in the "Circus of Picasso" and prosecutes some of his own, picking on Jean Cocteau ruthlessly I'd be curious to read more to see if this is warranted.
There were parts I intended to skim, about gallerists and patrons and the market, but found fascinating and read every word, Richardson delves into the personal but also excels in analyzing the art of Picasso and his peers,
Profusely illustrated, sadly only in black and white, If you have Pinterest handy you will find it a useful adjunct for illustrations and sideresearch,
Justbecause of glaring design blunders, Type is simply too small and leading too stingy, To compound this, the inside margins are insufficient so you are reading too close to spine of book, with resulting eye strain from curving lines of text and shadows.
Happily, Volume, which is nearby waiting for me, seems much improved in this aspect, This book is the second of three volumes of the artist's life, The first one traced his early life and this one continues as Picasso becomes entrenched in the Parisian Bohemian world, surrounding himself with artists, poets, writers, and in the last chapters,the ballet.
These years largely concentrate around Picasso's cubist works and his relationship with other cubist artists, especially Braque,
We also learn about his tempestuous love affairs, leaving off one, another one dying, and yet others who abandon him,
This is also the Great War years, where many of his colleagues joined in the fight, while Picasso, belonging to a neutral country, stayed out.
He also chose to stay out of Paris for most of the war years to avoid the humiliation of a woman handing him a white feather, which the ladies of Paris were offering to all the men who refused to go to the front.
This volume ends just as Picasso is becoming involved with Diaghilev's Ballet troupe, creating sets, collaborating with Eric Satie, whom he admired, and Jean Cocteau, whom he loathed.
We are just introduced to the ballerina Olga Khokhlova, whom Picasso will eventually marry, when the volume rather abruptly ends, The ego has landed
My goodness Picasso was a selfloving poseur! Just look at the cocksure stance he adopts in the cover photo, This image, in which his clothing itself appears rather cubist both in the odd patchwork cut, and the choice of different textures and patterns of fabric is one of a series of selfportraits he took in his own various studios.
Some of which, such as those where he's stripped down to nought but pants I wouldn't be at all surprised if he photographed himself au naturel are far more narcissistic.
The physically pintsized Picasso incontestably remains a giant of modern art, but he still manages to make himself look rather ridiculous in several of these photographic selfportraits.
But surely his volcanic ego must have been part of what helped him to become such a great artist His belief in his own greatness is certainly very tangible, both in his work, and in these odd photos, a fair number of which Richardson includes here.
In this second instalment of Richardson's epic biography, we're focussed on just one decade,, essentially the era of Cubism, The period when Picasso made the transition form starving bohemian to rich and successful avantgardist, But Picasso being who and what he is, it's so much more than just one style or phase,
Firstly there's the Parade pardon the artsy pun of interesting characters he mixes with, from his mistresses to his art dealers, and of course fellow artists, some of whom, like Braque in particular, he has a particularly direct connection with, whereas others, such as the writer/intellectual types, e.
g. Appollinaire, Salmon and Cocteau, he has very involved but more oblique lines of communication with,
And further still, even one style turns out in fact to be a multiplicity of rich diversity, with Cubism being a vastly oversimplifying label applied to period that has generated numerous subdivisions 'analytic' or 'synthetic' cubism, for example, and whose tenets he might completely abandon at any given moment, as he does when he adopts a much more obviously traditional neoclassicist mode.
Richardson's first volume was, for me, a little more fun, covering as it did a longer and more varied period, I think I also find the formative years of many artists I've certainly found this to be true of a lot of the musicians that I've read and/or written about the most fascinating.
But this is just as well done, and this period of Picasso's Vesusvian output deserves the close focus he gives it, Can't wait to get stuck into volume III! The first volume may have taken meyears to read, but this one only took betweenand, Again, it was never because I was bored, These Richardson books make it easy to dip in for a few pages and then come out again, I am always able to pick up the strain where I left off,
This is the volume that begins with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon inand moves through cubism, then ends with Picasso about to move into classism or his version of it.
It is a tremendously active period, and all happening while Europe fell apart for the first time, Again Richardson is great with the stories of characters, both major and minor, in Picasso's life, He makes each one a sketch, sometimes short, sometimes quite lengthy, He is good with the historical moments and with the geography in Paris and beyond that Picasso moved through,
But Richardson is also very good discussing the art and the technique and the need for the modernist experiments, For instance, amid all the very good, even great, discussions
of cubism, he has this coming off Roger Allard: "cubism was a means of registering 'mass, volume and weight.
' Henceforth 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.
" This opens up so much! I mean, think of the "gestural" art of the abstract expressionists that's all coming from this understanding,
If I were to criticize these first two volumes, it would be about the lack of color illustrations, These volumes are rich in wellreproduced art, but nothing in color, I see that in Vol III that will change, and I wonder if there will be even more in the posthumous Vol, IV, due in November of this year, I look forward to it, It is great to realize that even afteryears, I am only half way through this wonderful biography, The three volumes by John Richardson are THE definitive biography of Picasso, They are must read for anyone interested in Picasso, Really masterful a more difficult book than vol I but the topic is more difficult, Richardson's account is eyeopening his portraits and sympathetic admiration for Braque and Apollinaire, in particular, is infectious his negative views of Gertrude Stein, Cocteau, Gris, and many others.
. . , persuasive the sad account of Eva, the portraits of the many women in this period of Picasso's life including Fernande his always clear view of both the genius and charisma and the warts as well of his protagonist and his account of the structure and purpose and development of cubism are all handled brilliantly.
Quite a book! If volis as good is vols I and II, . . , well, let's hold off judgement for now, Very good information, especially the way Richardson fills out Braque, Another masterpiece of insightful facts not only about Picasso but all the other artists involved throughout the period, And the times themselves.
Can't wait to start volumeThe second A Life of Picasso, Vol. 2's as great as the first, The sketches and paintings are great, I found myself, in each volume, staring at the pictures then reading, Another great book that should be read for all Picasso fans, Richardson's Picasso books could almost be categorized as reference materials rather than biographies, I'm happy that I own them, as Richardson covers so many events and people that I would like to eventually learn more about, but it isn't the breeziest of reads with exceptions like the bits about the Louvre robberies.
It took me a while to finish this one, but it's definitely worth the read, It's interesting how John Richardson sees Picasso as the incarnation of Baudelaire's 'the Painter of Modern Life', I have four points to make,
First, "A Life of Picasso" amazingly fleshes out, through foibles and fantastic behaviors, the human beings who make up that mythologized time, Apollinaire steps down into human frailty, Cocteau reveals himself as someone I would not like, Braque emerges as someone I would want to be, and Matisse becomes again a vague, removed specter of giantness no matter what I learn about him, always this.
The women, especially Fernand, also live and breathe, but after a while they become a blended type, I suspect this was because of Picasso's restricted understanding of women, Even Gertrude Stein steps down out of her portrait Picasso was wrong, she never became what he painted, I loved every vignette, Which leads me to points Two and Three:
So, Point Two: Picasso himself seems absent, He is like the center of a vortex, Everything spins about him, but his actual self is not there, I found this very curious, because Volume One held him so firmly and prominently in sight,
Point Three: Every paragraph, and each was nearly the same in length and style as every other paragraph, seemed to serve as a monograph on either a particular event surrounding the astonishing paintings Picasso's and others, or of someone in his circle.
It got dull in parts, but only in the reading, The information in each paragraph was stunning, But it was like spending time only with sequential "cubist" paintings, about which this volume focuses: you go in interested, certain you grasp what is conveyed, but then all of the planes and facts begin crashing in the brain like too much code for the RAM.
Eventually you lose focus, though not curiosity, It was a weird trip,
Fourth: It feels complete except for the absence of Picasso, It is invaluable not just for its details, but for its portraiture, Masterful. I feel like I know all of these people, in a way as though I was in their time rather them being brought into mine, The only one, again, that I missed was the artist himself,
Not just an important book, but a necessary one, I learned so much about a subject I thought I already knew much about, .