Transformer
The brilliant alchemy of Picasso's mature years, acutely rendered in John Richardson's biography
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, Léger, 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 habitués 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-Thérèse 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."
Picasso's charisma emerged as a powerful force, and people were magnetically drawn to him. He cast a spell on Cocteau, Clive Bell (the influential Bloomsbury critic), Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dalí, André Breton (spokesman for the Surrealists), and countless others. His oldest and closest friends in Paris were the great poet Apollinaire and the spiritually ascetic Max Jacob. He immortalized them and himself disguised as "Three Musicians" (painted in two versions, 1921), among his best-known paintings.
The story begins in Rome with Picasso, recently jilted by two lovers in succession, eager for marriage. He is also researching scenic sources for Diaghilev's comic ballet, "Parade," and discovers the great traditions of commedia dell'arte, incorporating all sorts of derivative symbols into stage sets, costumes, and curtains that he designs for a sequence of ballets for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. By 1919 Picasso had become such a celebrity that he needed to subscribe to a press-clipping service, and within a year the prices for his paintings would begin to rise dramatically.
The first American exhibition of Picasso's paintings opened in New York on Nov. 17, 1923, at the Wildenstein Gallery, but significantly it included very little that verged on cubism. His French dealer, and Wildenstein, understood all too well that few American collectors were ready for radical modernism, so the show featured neoclassical works and others that were tamely representational and "pleasant." Even so, the display did not sell especially well. His first full-scale retrospective, with 225 paintings spanning the years 1900-32, took place in Paris and then Zurich in 1932. It included sculpture because in 1928-29 Picasso became increasingly engaged by the creation of three-dimensional art. Just as he never learned to drive in order to safeguard his hands for art, he found others to do his welding for the same reason.
Richardson is overwhelmingly authoritative. He is not only fully comfortable with the necessary languages, but also with Christian, mythic, and pagan symbolism, with Spanish folklore and superstitions, with Vesalius and with "Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body" - all essential in interpreting Picasso's psyche and art. Because Richardson knew Picasso and gained his confidence, he could ask specific questions during the 1950s and was told intimate things. Consequently Richardson corrects many misunderstandings about the artist's work, especially the dates when certain key pieces were painted. The text is peppered with "I doubt it" and "Nonsense," which is likely to distress many who have written about Picasso. He names names.
Richardson also does much to clarify Picasso's major artistic influences, and the degree of his debt to Corot, Seurat, Cezanne, and above all Ingres. The book is filled with acute insights about the symbolism of guitars and even gas pumps standing in for women. The author explains that Picasso's still lifes (often so mystifying to the lay viewer) are invariably parables with multiple layers of meaning. He observes that "paradox is intrinsic to Picasso's vision. He had an instinctive understanding of something pop artists would discover fifty years later: namely that banality, even inanity, used ironically can provoke people into seeing familiar things anew." Picasso took perverse pleasure in perplexing people.
Who should read this engaging volume? Anyone with an interest in the flush phase of modernism - Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and James Joyce all figure in the story - or is fascinated by the interwar years and the intriguing drama of Russian ballet's transformational period (enhanced by an infusion of Spanish flamenco and the music of Manuel de Falla), or the complex ways in which art is marketed and achieves its mysterious value. But above all, it should be read because of Richardson's subtle and deft weaving of art analysis into the sexually charged saga of a brilliantly creative life.
Michael Kammen teaches at Cornell. His most recent book is "Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture." 