A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932
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Now in paperback: the third volume of John Richardson’s magisterial Life of Picasso.Here is Picasso at the height of his powers in Rome and Naples, producing the sets and costumes with Cocteau for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and visiting Pompei where the antique statuary fuel his obsession with classicism; in Paris, creating some of his most important sculpture and painting as part of a group that included Braque, Apollinaire, Miró, and Breton; spending summers in the South of France in the company of Gerald and Sara Murphy, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. These are the years of his marriage to the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova—the mother of his only legitimate child, Paulo—and of his passionate affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was, as well, his model and muse.A groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.The Washington Post - Michael Dirda…energetically opinionated, sprightly and illuminating in its analytic passages, casually cruel in its put-downs of lesser artists…and downright lubricious in its fascination with sex. Compared to the learned historicism of an E.H. Gombrich or the urbane connoisseurship of a Kenneth Clark, Richardson's tell-all biography reads something like a high-brow gossip column. The book is wickedly, sinfully entertaining…This isn't a coffee-table dust-gatherer or a reference to file away on a shelf and open only out of a sense of duty. It is a biography with real fizz, every page offering pleasure as well as insight and illumination.
