A Life of Picasso II: The Cubist Rebel 1907-1916

InThe Cubist Rebel, 19071916, the second volume of hisLife of Picasso, John Richardson reveals the young Picasso in the Baudelairean role of "the painter of modern life"a role that stipulated the brothel as the noblest subject for a modern artist. Hence his great breakthrough painting,Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, with which this book opens. As well as portraying Picasso as a revolutionary, Richardson analyzes the more compassionate side of his genius. The misogynist of posthumous legend turns out to have been surprisingly vulnerablemore often sinned against than sinning. Heartbroken at the death of his mistress Eva, Picasso tried desperately to find a wife. Richardson recounts the untold story of how his two great loves of 191517 successively turned him down. These disappointments, as well as his horror at the outbreak of World War I and the wounds it inflicted on his closest friends, Braque and Apollinaire, shadowed his painting and drove him off to work for the Ballets Russes in Rome and Naplesback to the ancient world. In this volume we see the artist's life and work during the crucial decade of 190717, a period during which Picasso and Georges Braque devised what has come to be known as cubism and in doing so engendered modernism. Thanks to the author's friendship with Picasso and some of the women in his life, as well as Braque and their dealer, D. H. Kahnweiler, and other associates, he has had access to untapped sources and unpublished material. InThe Cubist Rebel,Richardson also introduces us to key figures in Picasso's life who have been totally overlooked by previous biographers. Among these are the artist's Chilean patron, collector, and mother figure, Eugenia Errazuriz, as well as two fiancees: the loveable Genevieve Laporte and the promiscuous bisexual painter Irene Lagut. By harnessing biography to art history, he has managed to crack the code of cubism more successfully than any of his predecessors. And by bringing fresh light to bear on the artist's private life, he has succeeded in coming up with a new view of this paradoxical man and of his paradoxical work. Never before have Picasso's revolutionary vision, technical versatility, prodigious achievements, and, not least, his sardonic humor been analyzed with such clarity.

John Richardson was born in 1924. He studied art at the Slade School but soon gave up painting for art criticism. In 1949 he moved to Provence, where he helped the collector Douglas Cooper transform the Château de Castille near Avignon into a private museum of cubist painting. For the next twelve years he lived in France where he became friends with Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Cocteau. With Picasso's encouragement he embarked on an analytic study of the artist's portraits, part of which is incorporated in the present biography.

In the early 1960s Richardson went to live in New York City where he was appointed head of Christie's U.S. operation. Besides having organized various exhibitions, he has written books on Manet and Braque and is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. The first volume of his Life of Picasso was published to wide acclaim in 1991 and won England's prestigious Whitbread Prize. In 1993 he was made a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In 1994-95 he served as the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford University. Currently he divides his time between Connecticut and New York City, where he is working on the third and fourth volumes of this biography.


From the Hardcover edition.