This is a very rich biography of Picasso from birth (1881) to the apogee of a successful career as a leader of the avantgarde in 1932. From my earliest involvement with art, I have followed Picasso’s work and that of his milieu, digging ever deeper as an amateur rather than an academic. It was a labor of love and even kind of a framework for my life, one of my motivations for establishing a life in Paris as a youth. These books draw together not just many of the things I've learned but pushed me into surprising new areas. It is a great reading experience.
There were a number of things that surprised me. Though I had always thought Picasso was Basque, in fact he only had distant ancestors who were – the majority were from southern Spain. I had also thought that his father, a teacher, was a frustrated artist who had pushed his son to pursue his career as an artist unambiguously. Not so: his father specialized in painting pigeons, exhibiting a rarified style that had a very parochial, if solid, market.
Picasso’s story began in Andalusia, where his father was viewed as a ne'er-do-well mediocrity, a dreamer and wastrel who was not up to the reputation of his once-illustrious family. His mother was a stabilizing force of sunny humor as the family was shunted around to poor-paying jobs, ending up in Barcelona. Pablo was emerging as a brilliant art student of phenomenal energy, mastering the basics but eager to strike into new territories. He broke with his father, who wanted him to become a traditional court portraitist.
Early on, Picasso was viewed as a Spanish artist, a virtuoso who could please bourgeois audiences with stylized portraits. Much of his blue period reflected an obscure school of painting in Barcelona. While he got some attention when he went to Paris in 1900 for that market, it proved fleeting. When he returned to Paris in 1904, he was unable to sell his blue paintings, which were stored in an apartment and easily might have disappeared entirely. He was reduced to abject poverty, wounding his pride though he apparently maintained his narcissistic self confidence.
By the end of the first volume (1906), he was on the cusp of recognition as the premier avant-garde painter in the world, with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, his radical cubist experiment that appeared in 1907, completing the revolution in painting started by the Impressionists: rather than brush technique and color, Picasso went much farther, eliminating perspective and subverting any remnant of the Renaissance tradition.
While the Cubists never did much for me, Richardson covers the beginnings of the movement brilliantly. Picasso made many incredible friends, including Braque, Apollinarie, Jarry and a variety of lesser talents, all of them pioneers. He began to experiment with form and color, particularly under the influence of El Greco, Ingres, Manet, Gauguin and Cezanne. In Spain, Richardson believes, he also studied the primitivism in ancient Hispanic artifacts.
Picasso was then with Fernande Olivier, his first great love. Their relationship was tumultuous, his infidelities innumerable, but she was immortalized in many of his earlier works. His friendship with Gertrude Stein dates from this time and provides wonderful context, as do many of the hangers on and lesser talents with whom Picasso surrounded himself.
The second volume (1907-16) combines the biography of Picasso with art criticism and the art history of his times. After a brief hiatus in Andorra, he settled for the 4th time in France. His work began to sell again, particularly to Gertrude and Leo Stein, whose apartment gallery was highly influential with collectors.
My sketch of the basics cannot do justice to the excitement of the writing. For example, there is a chapter on his first meeting with Matisse in 1906, whom he saw as his most significant competitor for leadership of the avant-garde; it covers what they were trying to do and how, in terms of technique but also the markets they were aiming to dominate. And that is just one instance: the entire book has similar syntheses of the currents of his times. Many of the paintings I have admired my entire life are also explained, that is, where they were done, who is in them, and how they fit into Picasso's artistic development. It is a great treat for aficionados.
The third volume ends in 1933, when Picasso is only 52. This volume is just as interesting as the first two. It starts when Picasso, in his late 30s, was considering a bourgeois marriage - the provision of a male heir was his principal concern. As perhaps the most famous artist alive, he finally had the means to live as he wanted and to attract people to him as never before. In the prime of life. After several proposals were refused by others, he settled on Olga Khokhlova, a dancer in Diaghilev’s troupe. In the book, she comes off as appallingly mundane and small minded, her beauty notwithstanding. Until she deteriorated into explosive jealousy and then perhaps mental illness, they led an upper middle class life that was sedate and secure.
Picasso’s work was in creative explosion. Emerging from the great innovations of cubism, he first turned to set design for ballet in cooperation with Diaghilev, which taught him about painting on a large scale and introduced him to cutting-edge composers of the day, Satie and Stravinski. He also experimented with classical images, studying the form while consciously violating the rules of proportion. Then, he flirted with the surrealists, whose leader André Breton aggressively sought to enlist him into their movement. Meanwhile, Jean Cocteau served as a kind of jester sycophant, to the disdain of Breton and his cohort. Gertrude Stein was still there, but growing distant. Even Zelda and F Scott Fitzgerald were with the Picassos in the south of France in the late 1920s. One could not ask for a richer tableau of creative types and Richardson provides a plethora of anecdotes about their quirks and interactions.
Now, this might not be for everyone, but I have been interested in this cultural nexus for my entire adult life. It was a period of artistic genius akin to the Renaissance, whose traditions it set out to consciously violate. In every period, Richardson explores what Picasso was trying to do in ways that impacted art history, particularly as it reflected his personal life and struggles. He changed painting and sculpture decisively, opening paths that are still under exploration, about all of which Richardson is intimately acquainted.
Throughout, the level of detail is pitch perfect, at least for me. Richardson was a beautiful, evocative writer, a genuine prose master and his knowledge base was phenomenal, indeed unparalleled. That being said, the book is both scholarly and a reporting project, relying on interviews as well as strenuous archive digging; it never lags or gets bogged down in proofs or minutiae. Finally, though they were personal friends, the tone of the book is critical but admiring, debunking many stories and myths. It never gets caught in hagiography or hero worship, but is a vital inquiry into the mystery of genius.