The Modern Lovers famously penned a self-lacerating tribute to Picasso: “He was only 5’ 3”/Girls could not resist his stare/Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole, not like you.”
Actually, plenty of people had far worse things to say about Picasso, some girls did resist (though few resisted for long), and, yes, his life was mammoth beyond what any teenager in a ’70s Boston band could aspire to. As productive as he was long-lived, Picasso (1881-1973) was born a year before James Joyce and lived long enough to watch the Watergate scandal unfold.
A life like Picasso’s does not necessarily give rise to a biographer capable or worthy of the task. In John Richardson, Picasso has been most fortunate in finding a biographer who uses the artist’s life primarily to enhance and shed light on the work. Comparisons to Richard Ellmann (James Joyce) and Leon Edel (Henry James) are not unwarranted. All three biographers never lose focus on the fact that their subject’s life is worthy of years of study because his creative work provides a lifetime of pleasures. Not that these biographers are flawless, but all have created biographies that send readers back to the works of Joyce, James and Picasso, respectively, with renewed excitement.
Of course, as an artist, Picasso presents a different challenge than a writer, an art the biographer shares with his subject. But Richardson has an advantage—he knew Picasso in the artist’s later years. Yet, while Richardson is able to bring Picasso’s ’60s-era perspective to bear on incidents from the ’20s and ’30s, he also never gives undue weight to these recollections. His judgments always seem sound and are heavily explained in the notes. There may be disadvantages as well for Richardson’s project to having known Picasso, especially when covering those years of his life that overlap with the acquaintance. Only time will tell how Richardson will face those later years. Although this is the third volume of his Life of Picasso, and even though it weighs in at 500 pages, it nonetheless ends well before the outbreak of World War II.
A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years 1917-1932 is all about an artist in medias res. At the time The Triumphant Years concludes, Picasso still has plenty of triumphs ahead of him, including his masterpieces reinterpreting masterpieces, much incredible sculpture, including the Chicago Picasso, and the productivity of his final years. Meanwhile, at the start of The Triumphant Years, as Richardson’s earlier volumes demonstrate, there is plenty the painter, in his late 30s, has already accomplished, including the Blue Period from decades earlier and the fame that came from the initial notoriety of Cubism.
Richardson opens this volume as the First World War grinds to its conclusion. Picasso is in Italy, enjoying being famous and dabbling in ballet sets and costumes. Returning to Paris, the constantly migrating artist begins a brief neoclassical phase, during which he is also still creating cubist masterpieces like “Table, Guitar and Bottle.” Richardson notes: “However far Picasso goes in one direction, he continues to stray in the other.” It is this dynamic, both personal and professional, that keeps Picasso so interesting and his life so eventful and his productivity so extreme.
Therefore, though in many ways a bridge volume, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years 1917-1932 is fittingly monumental in itself. And it presents another high challenge for whatever number of volumes Richardson still plans before he concludes his biography.
At times, one could wish Richardson’s pace would pick up, of course. Does even the most trivial interaction with fringe elements of the Bloomsbury Group really need thorough exploration? But that thought, while inevitable, is also churlish, because Richardson’s premise and talent are inextricably linked to the length and density of his biography and come from a passionate faith in the thesis that appreciation of Picasso’s art is enhanced by probing the artist’s life in this much detail. The risk of being prurient is obvious, and though frequently amused and sometimes disgusted by his subject’s antics, Richardson rarely dwells on their salacious details more than necessary to make a point.
That balance must be hard for Richardson to maintain, because Picasso’s private life remains the gift that keeps on giving—it offers biographers an endless mutating situation comedy (and, occasionally, tragedy) filled with his many affairs, moves, incidents of scandal and feuds. Richardson keeps the pages filled with characters from every walk of life, including whores from any brothel Picasso could reach and his more complex interactions with names still recalled like Matisse, Cocteau, Stravinsky, Satie, Diaghilev, Massine and, most of all, Apollinaire. Richardson does his best to separate fact from the self-aggrandizement of many members of this circle, and he usually has an important point at the end.
In The Triumphant Years, Richardson’s approach pays off most obviously in examining Picasso’s attempts at representing one of the few women who did offer some resistance to his sexual charms, a Russian ballerina, Olga Khokhlova. Khokhlova did not approve of premarital sex. This response was surprisingly new for Picasso to encounter in a woman, and he eventually agreed to marry her. Richardson convincingly traces how the affectionate and realistic early portraits of his wife mutate horribly with the twists in the Picassos’ marriage.
As ever, Picasso emerges from Richardson’s rendering as an artist and person larger than life. Still, it’s hard to believe that Richardson or any biographer can write this painter’s entire life—and even harder to believe that Picasso actually lived through all of these meticulously annotated accounts of his creativity, socializing and debauchery.
A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years 1917-1932
****
John Richardson
Knopf, $40