Transformer

The brilliant alchemy of Picasso's mature years, acutely rendered in John Richardson's biography

November 11, 2007|Michael Kammen

A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932
By John Richardson
Knopf, 592 pp., illustrated, $40

No one is better qualified than John Richardson to explore the extraordinary life of Pablo Picasso, the single most influential artist of the 20th century. Richardson, born in England in 1924, studied art, but became a writer and ballet critic. From 1949 until 1961 he lived in France, where he became friends with Picasso, Braque, L&#xE9;ger, and the versatile writer Jean Cocteau. Since 1961 he has lived in New York, producing books about Manet and Braque among others, but above all his masterfully detailed multivolume life of Picasso, for which he enjoyed special access to the artist's papers and candid conversations with Picasso's widow, Jacqueline, as well as several of the women with whom Picasso lived previously.

Volume 1, subtitled "The Prodigy" (1991), spanned the years 1881-1906, from Picasso's Catalan origins to his bohemian struggles in Paris. Volume 2, "The Cubist Rebel," covered the pivotal decade 1907-16, in which the artist made the brothel and its habitu&#xE9;s a noble subject for modern art - though not without controversy. As compelling as those two prize-winning works were, the latest installment, which can be read independently, is the most intriguing yet because the period treated was so innovative. Picasso experimented with neoclassicism during the early to mid-1920s, all the while reinventing cubism in various ways: sometimes volumetric, sometimes flat, and increasingly anthropomorphic. During these years he also lived a dual life: publicly bourgeois and increasingly affluent but covertly still the bohemian, preferring extramarital affairs, sausage, and wine to caviar and champagne.

The artist's obsession with women and sex - most notably a Russian ballerina named Olga Khokhlova, who became his first wife (1918-35), and his beautiful mistress Marie-Th&#xE9;r&#xE8;se Walter (1927-36) - would lead increasingly to paintings in which male and female genitalia would be displayed, sometimes converging, sometimes scattered and rearranged, even concealed in still lifes, furniture, and natural objects like stones. Picasso is supposed to have said: "To put eyes between the legs, or sex organs on the face. To contradict. To show one eye full face and one in profile. Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them."