The New Criterion

John Richardson
A Life of Picasso, Volume III:
The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932.
Knopf, 608 pages, $40

It’s been sixteen years since volume 1, The Early Years, 1881–1906, of John Richardson’s monumental Life of Picasso first appeared and eleven since the publication of volume 2, The Painter of Modern Life, 1907–1917. This month, the long-awaited volume 3, The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932, has arrived. (A final fourth volume has been promised from the start.) In volume 1, Richardson and his superb collaborator, Marilyn McCully, set a new standard with their richly detailed, scrupulously researched, almost overwhelmingly informative account of Picasso’s childhood and his formative years as a student and a young artist in Barcelona and in Paris. With its lavish detail and ample servings of gossip, volume 1 both enlarged our knowledge and dispelled some of the Picasso myths—such as the story about Picasso’s artist father’s laying down his brushes forever, awed by his teen-age son’s gifts. Since Andrea Verrocchio is said to have reacted the same way to an angel painted by his apprentice Leonardo da Vinci, the tale always seemed problematic, but Richardson’s discussion of the earliest surviving works left no doubt that while the aspiring young artist was abundantly talented, he was not quite the prodigy that legend insisted on. Picasso’s virtuosity was not conferred upon him at birth by a benevolent fairy godmother, but rather was hard won, through diligent study.

Volume 2 dealt with more familiar territory—the Cubist years and the well-documented, much studied collaboration with Georges Braque—but it still offered fresh information about such topics as Picasso’s amorous entanglements, his connections with the literary and artistic life of bohemian Paris of the period, his unwitting involvement in the notorious theft of Iberian sculptures from the Louvre known as “l’affaire des statuettes,” and much more.

The cumulative effect of the two volumes was to reveal something of Picasso’s mercurial, difficult personality. We came to know a deeply self-absorbed, driven, deeply superstitious man, someone capable of both unexpected generosity and astonishing brutality, a living embodiment of contradiction whose restless questioning of aesthetic conventions coexisted with an embrace of some of the most primitive notions of human relations, especially where women were involved. Richardson recounted incident after incident, at high speed, reinforcing his discussions with meticulous interpretations and identifications of Picasso’s imagery. It was obvious, though, from both volume 1 and volume 2, that A Life of Picasso was no neutral, impartial mustering of facts. Instead, everything was plainly filtered through the author’s unabashed prejudices and quirks—unabashed, in part, because, as a member of Picasso’s circle in the later years of the artist’s life, Richardson felt himself to be specially close to his subject’s own point of view. Take, for example, the biographer’s willingness to accept uncritically Picasso’s most egregiously awful behavior, especially to the women in his life. Richardson appeared to share Picasso’s conviction that his gifts as an innovator gave him license to do more or less whatever he pleased. In the spirit of “tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner,” the author expended a good deal effort explaining, for example, how Picasso’s intense fear of illness and death—which frequently led to apparently callous actions—was related to his sense of himself as a shaman with extraordinary powers, an artificer who couldn’t risk disturbing the potent forces that inspired him through contamination. We rapidly came to recognize Richardson’s unconcealed dislike of some members of Picasso’s world, his admiration for others, and his lack of sympathy for the majority of women connected with the artist. But if Richardson’s literal application of Charles Baudelaire’s directive that criticism should be “partisan and passionate” was occasionally irritating, it also made for lively reading.

Volume 3, The Triumphant Years, has many of the strengths and weaknesses of the preceding two volumes. It moves at a breakneck gallop, it’s full of often arcane, fascinating information, it’s made personal by undisguised opinions, enthusiasms, and aversions, and it strikes an elegant balance between deeply informed interrogations of works of art, well-supported revelations about the artist’s state of mind and pure—albeit well-documented—gossip. The period under review, 1917 to 1932, spans the years in which Picasso was married to his first wife, the dancer Olga Khokhlova, a member of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, who was the mother of his son Paulo. Picasso’s fraught relationship with Olga is, essentially, the backbone of the book but Richardson brings to life all the other complexities of the period, which include such provocative moments as Picasso’s collaborations with the composers Erik Satie and Igor Stravinsky, with the dancer/choreographer Léonide Massine, and with the writers Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau during the years he worked extensively for Diaghilev. Richardson follows closely Picasso’s tangled relationships in the volatile world of the French vanguard and his friendships with such American expatriates as Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, the Gerald Murphys, and the Princesse de Polignac (née Singer, of the sewing machine fortune), with Ernest Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, and the pioneer cultural commentator Gilbert Seldes. He follows even more closely Picasso’s activity as an artist during the decades under scrutiny, correcting sequences and dates, and providing usually convincing sources and interpretations of the often arcane imagery of Picasso’s decors, ballet programs, portraits, book illustrations, forays into sculpture, and more—everything from intimate notebook drawings to self-conscious efforts at masterpieces. (Regrettably—and frustratingly—not all the works Richardson discusses are reproduced.)

Given the graphically documented parade of women in Picasso’s life, each of whom inspired some variant in his approach to image-making, it’s a little startling to realize that he remained married to Olga for almost twenty years—1918 to 1936, roughly between the end of the First World War and the start of the Spanish Civil War—the crucial years from his late-thirties to his mid-fifties. As Richardson reminds us, this comes as a surprise largely because, her significance as official wife and mother of the son of a “proud Spanish husband” notwithstanding, there is no “epoque Olga,” as there is with Picasso’s mistresses—Fernande Olivier, Eva Guell, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, and their colleagues of shorter duration. “For the first five years of their marriage,” Richardson observes, “Olga never appears in any of his innovative masterpieces but only in representational portraits, from which the affection gradually seeps… . It was only later when her physical and psychological problems took their toll on the marriage that she would play a dominant role in Picasso’s revolutionary imagery. These problems called for exorcism. This would take the form of images seething with ridicule and rage, cruelty, and resentment.” (See what I mean about Richardson’s ability to share his subject’s viewpoint?)

The years with Olga are defined not by a type of image exclusively associated with her, but rather with a wide range of stylistic shifts in Picasso’s work, from a sidestepping of the radical formal inventions of Cubism in favor of a sometimes parodic, sometimes seriously reconceived Neo-Classicism, to a solidification of his mature “post-Cubist” style, and explorations of a personal version of Surrealism. The “Olga years” are the period when Picasso enjoyed increasing success and his name began to be synonymous with modern art, when he rejected the bohemian way of life—and most of the friends—of his early, poverty-stricken days in Paris for the company of le gratin—the upper crust—and bourgeois domesticity. Yet Richardson makes it plain that Picasso was still Picasso; though volume 3 begins with Picasso’s marriage, it ends with the Marie-Thérèse Walter years, when the artist lived a double life, dividing his time between Madame son épouse and the teen-age mistress whose pale blondeness and luminous flesh he obsessively revisited in paint.

Richardson gives precise information about what happened when and dissects the complicated relations, motives, feuds, and alliances of this extraordinary period, often offering details and observations that make us rethink previously held opinions. He makes a convincing case, for example, for the lasting effect of the Picasso’s time in Italy with the Ballets Russes, citing the importance of a trip to Naples, Pompeii, and Herculaneum with Diaghilev and Cocteau—organized as consolation for the Pope’s failing to grant an audience to the company. Richardson finds clear echoes of the thick-bodied, small-headed Farnese Hercules and of a monumental head of Juno, both Roman copies of Greek prototypes, in the collection of the Naples Archaeological Museum, in Picasso’s version of Neo-Classicism. It was during the stay in Rome, too, that Picasso and Stravinsky met for the first time and, Richardson tells us, “took an instant liking to one another and would remain friends for life.” Speculating on the reasons for this affinity, Richardson suggests that because both the artist and the composer were “in the process of using modernism to regenerate classicism, they found themselves confronting similar problems.” (Then he adds this startling observation: “The fact that neither Spain nor Russia had undergone a renaissance made their mutual understanding all the more instinctive.”)

Richardson makes no effort to hide his own likes and dislikes among the cast of characters of volume 3. His affection for Picasso is apparently boundless. He likes the art historian Alfred Barr and seems to respect Françoise Gilot and Jacqueline Picasso, but he’s a bit dismissive of Matisse, whom he says “uses patterns decoratively” while Picasso “uses them dramatically to establish a mood and characterize the woman in the picture.” (Larger relationships between Matisse and Picasso, Richardson feels, have recently been so extensively examined that nothing further needs to be said.) Cocteau elicits particular hostility—“For all his brilliance, there was little ballast or depth to this jester”—although Richardson rather grudgingly concedes that some of his films are significant. Misia Sert, patron of painters, poets, and writers, and Diaghilev’s backer, fares little better. According to Richardson, Misia, known for her acid tongue—she was called Tante Tue-tout, “Aunt Kill Everyone”—solicited Picasso for a portrait to add to her collection of those done by her celebrated artist friends. Picasso obliged but “instead of the Ingresque tribute to her belle époque charms that she had hoped for, he made a cubist mockery of her prognathous jaw, mean little mouth, brioche-shaped coiffeur, and pearls the size of ping-pong balls.” Richardson boasts of being the first to identify the 1918 portrait with Misia; he may be right, but it’s worth noting that Picasso liked her enough not only to have her as a witness to his wedding but to make her godmother of his first-born son. Clive Bell, the painter-theorist of the Bloomsbury circle, comes in for similar abuse, but this time there’s documentation suggesting that Picasso would have agreed. Most of all, Richardson seems to dislike Olga.

Curiously, while Picasso’s marriage is the connecting thread of volume 3, Olga never really emerges as a personality, apart from what we can read into the portraits and images of her—and Richardson reads a lot. He repeatedly describes her as “sickly,” “mournful,” and “skinny”—especially in contrast to the pneumatic images of Marie-Thérèse; he sees virtually every image of her after the early years of marriage as “menacing” and “ailing.” We are told, in off-hand asides, that she made terrible scenes of rage and jealousy, and that Françoise Gilot characterized her as extraordinarily solitary. (There’s no suggestion that any of this was justified.) Richardson’s description of the period after January 1927, when Picasso first picked up the zaftig seventeen-and-a-half-year old Marie-Thérèse outside the Galeries Lafayette, is a typical mixture of insight and bitchery, with occasional flashes of fair-mindedness:

The romance of Picasso’s seduction of Marie-Thérèse Walter has blinded people to the fact that Picasso continued to live and work at the rue la Boètie with a wife who was still totally obsessed by him and who took the role of Madame Picasso—elegant consort, zealous mother, impeccable maîtresse de maison—very much to heart. Olga had no intention of relinquishing this role, nor did Picasso, who still suffered from a residual bourgeois streak, want her to do so. Granted, Olga suffered from gynecological problems that left her prone to mental ones [italics mine], but much as Picasso would fulminate about her affliction, her attacks would prompt some of his most disturbed and disturbing images of women.

Richardson also tells us that home movies and snapshots of the Picassos on holiday, during the time when the most voluptuous images of Marie-Thérèse and the angriest images of Olga were being produced, show the family apparently enjoying each other’s company.

Richardson blames a lot on Olga; the saccharine side of Picasso’s Neo-Classicism, he implies, was a desire to make images that would please her, while the artist’s dropping most of the friends of his early years, especially the homosexuals, was a response to her aversion to bohemian standards. Richardson is particularly incensed by her treatment of Max Jacob. We are told that Olga did “her best to drive a wedge between Picasso and Jacob—the oldest and closest of his French friends and one of the finest poets of his time—by imputing all manner of misdeeds to him.” Richardson admits that Picasso seemed to enjoy hobnobbing with le gratin and owning a chauffeur-driven Hispano-Suiza; he even allows that the anger in the images from the late 1920s and early 1930s that he associates with Olga “suggests that Picasso suffered from the atavistic misogyny toward women that supposedly lurks in the psyche of every full-blooded Andalusian male”—and, apparently, in the psyche of some distinguished British art historians.

However alluring the gossip, volume 3 is a larger contribution to the Picasso literature. Richardson tracks the fruitful collaboration between Picasso and his compatriot Julio González, when Picasso shifted his focus to sculpture, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He unravels Picasso’s resentments of various dealers and the even more complicated relationships between them, especially in connection with the problematic auctions of his and his fellow Cubists’ works from the gallery stock of the German-born dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, seized by the French government during the First World War. Richardson uses his exhaustive correlation of biographical data and imagery to clarify the sequences and dating of works and to correct errors committed by other writers on the artist. He is particularly hard on a Canadian amateur art historian who based a book on wildly inaccurate information given him by Marie-Thérèse’s sister and takes to task serious scholars, including Rosalind Krauss, who believed the stories. Richardson takes the opportunity to set things straight, on the strength of several remarkably candid interviews granted to other researchers by Marie-Thérèse herself, a few years before her death in 1977. Yves-Alain Bois is similarly chastised, for other transgressions, although Richardson clearly finds him more worthy of respect than many of his colleagues. Richardson issues a general warning:

Picasso loved to tease and perplex. Anyone who believes he has cracked his code and knows for sure who is who in his imagery will soon or late discover that the artist perversely switches his code and shuffles physiognomies and identities in order to confuse us. Picasso hated to be taken for granted.

Yet Richardson himself has few inhibitions on this score. Volume 3 is notable for its engaged efforts to decipher Picasso’s images. Witness Richardson’s “unpacking” of Picasso’s quest to portray Marie-Thérèse, in paintings and sculptures, as a composite of male and female sexual organs or his discussion of the changing role of the ubiquitous armchair in the images of sleeping or lounging women, now a “trap,” now a luxurious frame, now an extension of the body sprawled against it. Such observations are the meat of volume 3. Richardson is equally pertinent in discussing Picasso’s relation to Braque: “The two artists may have grown apart, but when it came to painting, Picasso still subscribed to many of the precepts, not only the notion of metamorphosis but the notion of tactile space, that Braque had instilled in him. Braque would always occupy a central place in Picasso’s cosmology.”

In the time elapsed since A Life of Picasso first appeared in 1991 and even since the publication of volume 2 in 1996, the recherché field of artists’ biography has changed a great deal. Where formerly Richardson’s contribution could properly be judged only against his own efforts, it now must be weighed against such insightful, illuminating studies as Mark Stevens’s and Annalyn Swan’s De Kooning and Hilary Spurling’s two volumes on Matisse. How does volume 3 hold up to both its own antecedents and its recent competition? The answer is reasonably well. It’s plain that the de Kooning and Matisse biographies are more felicitously written, less dense, and less shrilly opinionated than any of the volumes of A Life of Picasso; rather than being told authoritatively how the artist’s work reflects the events of his life, we are allowed to form our own opinions. That’s largely the opposite of Richardson’s approach. But that may be the only way to deal with Picasso. Since the intimate details of his existence were the stimulus for his most inspired inventions, we’re probably fortunate that Richardson insists on telling us everything he knows about both. Let’s hope that we don’t have to wait another eleven years for volume 4.