A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Vol 3)
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Vol 3) Details
From Publishers Weekly 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.(Nov. 9) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Read more From The New Yorker "My work is like a diary," Picasso often said, and Richardson demonstrates the truth of this in the third installment of his biography. He rejoins Picasso after his Cubist stage, when Picasso is designing costumes for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and entering a primarily neoclassical period. The volume covers the years of his marriage to the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, the mother of his only legitimate child, Paulo, and describes their lavishly bourgeois life style in Paris and their summers in the South of France. The most striking aspect of this surefooted account is the link that Richardson shows between the women in Picasso’s life and the direction of his art. We witness the classic representations of his newlywed wife evolve, by the end of the marriage, into bifurcated demonic images; simultaneously, the entry of a teen-age mistress unleashes Picasso’s sexuality, which infuses all his future work. Copyright © 2007 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker Read more See all Editorial Reviews
Reviews
To be fair to the author, I have not read volume 1 or 2 that are part of this series. So based upon just reading volume 3, I can say that for my own personal taste, the book does not present enough (if any) insight into the mind and artistic process of Picasso, and it presents too much information about who Picasso was hanging out with, what he was doing on practically a day-to-day basis, and who was patronizing him. The book has an surprising lack of direct quotes or written statements from Picasso himself, so apparently Picasso was not one to talk or write much, which if that is truly the case, would not doubt make it difficult to discern how his mind worked or anything about his process.In addition, and this is based upon my thirty five plus years of being an artist and architect, and not based upon being a scholar of Picasso like Mr Richardson by any means, but I feel the author was a bit too liberal in applying the term "masterpiece" to so many of Picasso's work, although I do believe Picasso created many "masterpieces".... just not as many as the author claims.