A Life of Picasso

September 24, 2007
This third volume in Richardson's magisterial biography takes us through Picasso's middle years, as he establishes his mastery over craft, other artists and the women in his life. The story begins the year Picasso falls in love with Olga Kokhlova, a Russian dancer he met while working on the avant-garde ballet Parade
for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. By the end of the volume, Olga—his first wife—becomes “the victim of some of Picasso's most harrowing images.” The book elaborates on the details of Picasso's inspirations, with Richardson providing a balance of fact, salacious detail and art-historical critique. He is particularly skilled at evoking the humor and sexuality that imbues Picasso's portraits of Marie-Thérèse, who became his mistress when he was 45 and she 17: “As for the figure's amazing legs: the secret of their monumentality had escaped me” until Courbet's great view of Etretat gave him a clue: “Picasso has used the rock arches of Etretat... to magnify the scale of the bather's legs and breasts....” The artist's entire circle is also here, from Georges Braque to Henri Matisse, from André Breton to Ernest Hemingway. They are jealous collaborators, competitive geniuses, excessive bohemians, dear friends, frustrated homosexuals—while a handful of women come across as essential yet entirely replaceable. 48 pages of color illus., 275 illus. in text. 60,000 first printing.

Starred review from November 1, 2007
Art historian Richardson became acquainted with Picasso during the 1950s, and his firsthand knowledge adds zing to his extraordinarily vivid and perceptive biography of the master artist, a landmark work that now fills three substantial volumes. Here Richardson illuminates one of the most productive yet least understood periods in Picassos long, bold artistic quest. At 35, Picasso is determined to marry and sire an heir. In Rome to design sets and costumes for Diaghilevs Ballets Russes, Picasso diligently courts the virginal Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova. Temperamental opposites, they have a marriage far from passionate, but they do have a son (Picassos only legitimate child); and the genteel lifestyle Olga demands proves inspiring to Picasso, who turns out a succession of masterpieces. Richardson offers fresh analysis of Picassos neoclassical works and sense of gigantism, and explicitly contrasts Picassos cruel, exorcistic portraits of Olga with his exuberantly erotic portrayals of his young mistress, Marie-Therese Walter. In writing about Picassos complex sexuality, shamanistic beliefs, and anchoring of the modern in the savagery of antiquity, Richardson takes keen measure of Picassos genius. This is Picasso in his prime, and a biography so ensnaring in its details and provocative in its interpretation, Richardson leaves the reader hungry for still more.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)