Review by Choice Review
This is the first volume of the much anticipated four-volume biography that many have said would be the new "definitive" life of Picasso. Unfortunately the book seems surprisingly amateurish, with tortured arguments reordering the known facts, cavalier treatment of other scholars' work, and sometimes appalling lack of professionalism, as in its treatment of Gertrude Stein. Richardson does indeed present a wealth of "new" information and interpretation (though these two categories are often indistinguishable), based apparently on the research of Marilyn McCully. But since the author has inexplicably restricted his notes to an unscholarly minimum, it is all too often impossible to tell what is a new fact based on a document, a new theory based on an interview, or merely a new interpretation of available evidence, and whether indeed that interpretation is Richardson's or McCully's. This is a grave disappointment, belying this book's claim to definitiveness, since readers cannot judge for themselves but are asked to put faith in the fact that Richardson knew Picasso (in his seventies), the same sort of claim made by so many others. Although it does not supplant previous biographies, the book presents sufficient new material to deserve study. With selected bibliography and more than 900 black-and-white illustrations, many of them rare. -P. Leighten, University of Delaware
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Richardson, a modern art scholar published regularly in various journals including The New York Review of Books, has undertaken a monumental task: a four-volume biography of Picasso (perhaps the only modern artist with a life complex and spicy enough to fill so many pages). Picasso, Richardson's friend and neighbor, encouraged the endeavor, as curious as anyone about the mystery of his prodigious creative power. Accompanied by 675 black-and- white photographs, Richardson's carefully researched narrative patiently and insightfully traces the outlines of Picasso's first 26 years, from his precarious birth to the brink of success. He debunks well-worn myths, sticking to the facts about pivotal events in the artist's childhood that gave shape to his manipulative, magnetic, and self-dramatizing personality. Richardson analyzes Picasso's early works, spotlighting the lifelong link between sex and art and his pursuit of the new in both realms, and shadows him on his trips back and forth from his native Spain to Paris, the city of poets, opium, and whores, providing vivid portraits of his lovers and peers. Picasso has had many biographers, including ex-wives, but Richardson may well prove to be the most objective and well grounded. At any rate, he's off to a good start, guaranteeing an audience for future installments. --Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Remarkably intimate yet epic in sweep, this astonishing, continually engaging biography (first installment of a four-volume opus) neither glorifies Picasso nor paints him as an ogre. Richardson, who was the artist's close friend in France for a decade, attributes to Picasso's ``demonic Andalusian birthright'' his jolting oscillations between tenderness and cruelty, his self-dramatization, his harnessing of sexuality to his art. Like his much-maligned father, Jose Ruiz Blasco, an easy-going art teacher, Pablo, in Barcelona and Montmarte, was the star of a tertulia , a circle of cronies, who met regularly at a cafe to gossip and exchange views. As we watch the maternally overprotected prodigy transform himself into the daring, confident bohemian who took Paris by storm, Richardson ably untangles the skeinok of friendships and love affairs that Picasso transmuted into the personal mythology overflowing his canvases. Crammed with new insights, this synthesis weds an irresistible narrative to hundreds of wonderfully apposite photographs and art reproductions. It's one of the few books truly indispensable to understanding Picasso's artistic and spiritual growth. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The first installment of a proposed four-volume, richly illustrated biography of the Spanish master, by a writer who was a Riviera neighbor and friend of the artist for a dozen years. What Richardson has produced is a work of distinguished scholarship, notable for its clearsighted evaluation of Picasso's strengths and weaknesses and leavened by personal reminiscences--in short, biographical art of the highest quality, almost certain to become a classic of the genre. Considering his long involvement with Picasso, it is much to Richardson's credit that he maintains a scrupulously objective viewpoint, producing a work that combines a subtly shaded portrait of an enormously complex personality with perceptive analyses of his oeuvre. In the past, many Picasso biographers have seemingly been unable to deal with the artist so evenhandedly, preferring to either canonize or condemn. Jaime Sabarte in his Picasso: An Intimate Portrait (1949), for example, opted for hagiography, perpetuating without question the many myths Picasso spun around himself. Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, on the other hand, was intent on revealing her subject's monumental failings--cruelty, megalomania, chauvinism--in her Picasso: Creator and Destroyer (1988). The present volume traces Picasso's life from his birth in 1881 in the city of Malaga to the year 1906, when the artist was on the brink of creating the tradition-shattering Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Richardson's treatment of the complexities of the young Picasso's family life is revelatory. The author convincingly argues that, contrary to long-held belief, Picasso's father did not give up painting when he recognized his son's genius. As for Picasso's insistence that ""at the age of twelve, I drew like Raphael,"" Richardson finds the early drawings ""far from Raphaelesque."" On larger matters, he is equally perceptive. Of the Blue Period, he says, ""[These] paintings make sorrow acceptable to bourgeois taste by sentimentalizing and sanitizing it."" Turning his attention to the artist's use of color, he states, ""Picasso's sense of color was not instinctive; it was calculated."" He then backs up his statement by tracing the painter's erratic course ""from dark sickrooms to sunlit bullfights. . .from cubist monochrome to the local color of labels and posters, from the grisaille of Guernica to the Day-Glo maquillage of certain Dora Maars."" A monumental and immensely enjoyable work, superbly enhanced by 675 well-chosen b&w photos. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
