A life of Picasso. Vol. 2 1907-1917 - John Richardson

John Richardson draws on the same combination of lively writing, critical astuteness, exhaustive research, and personal experience which made a bestseller out of the first volume and vividly recreates the artist's life and work during the crucial decade of 1907-17 - a period during which Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented Cubism and to that extent engendered modernism.

Richardson has had unique access to untapped sources and unpublished material. 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 a fresh light to bear on the artist's often too sensationalised private life, he has succeeded in coming up with a totally new view of this paradoxical man of his paradoxical work. Never before has Picasso's prodigious technique, his incisive vision and not least his sardonic humour been analysed with such clarity.

John Richardson was born in London in 1924. He studied art at the Slade School but soon gave up painting for art criticism. In 1949 he moved to France, where he lived for the next twelve years, befriending Picasso, Braque, Lger, and Cocteau. In the early 1960s Richardson moved to New York, where he was appointed head of Christie's US operation, and eventually became a full-time writer and editor. He has published 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 A Life of Picasso, covering the years 1881-1906, was published in 1991 and won the Whitbread Prize. The second volume of A Life of Picasso, covering the years 1907-1917, was published in 1996.

In 1993 Richardson was made a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In 1994-95 he served as the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford. Currently he divides his time between Connecticut and New York City, where is working on the third and fourth volumes of A Life of Picasso.

John Richardson's second volume on Picasso confirms what his first suggested: that this is a masterpiece in the making, the most illuminating biography yet written on a twentieth-century visual artist... A continuous pleasure to read
Robert Hughes

Magisterial...Richardson's ambitious project dwarfs all previous biographies of Picasso... [He] has a gift for telling pen-portraits and makes vivid an entire gallery of pioneering dealers and early collectors.
Sunday Times - Frances Spalding

Richardson covers [the] momentous ten years from 1907 to the end of the First World War with great elegance and quiet authority... What makes the two published volumes so outstanding is the sense of Picasso the man emerging - in all his complexity - alongside the superb analysis of Picasso the artist
Spectator - William Boyd