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. In the early 1960s Richardson went to live in New York City where he was appointed head of Christie's U.S. With Picasso's encouragement he embarked on an analytic study of the artist's portraits, part of which is incorporated in the present biography. For the next twelve years he lived in France where he became friends with Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Cocteau. 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. He studied art at the Slade School but soon gave up painting for art criticism. His fascinating and illuminating narrative immerses us in one of the most exciting moments in twentieth-century cultural history, and brings to a close the definitive and critically acclaimed biography of one of the world's most celebrated artists.John Richardson was born in 1924. In 1943, Picasso met Françoise Gilot who would replace Maar and inspire a brilliant new sequence of paintings.Īs always, Richardson tells Picasso's story through his work, analysing how it shows what the artist was feeling and thinking. When the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, Picasso chose to remain in the city despite the threat that his art would be confiscated. The bombing of Guernica in April 1937 would inspire Picasso's vast masterwork of the same name, which he painted in just a few weeks for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World's Fair.

Richardson shows us the artist being as prolific as ever, painting Walter, as well as the surrealist photographer Dora Maar, who became a muse, collaborator and lover. It was during this time that Picasso began writing surrealist poetry and became obsessed with the image of himself as the mythic Minotaur. Picasso was contributing to André Breton's Minotaur magazine and spending time with the likes of Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Lee Miller, and the poet Paul Éluard, in Paris and the south of France.

The Minotaur Years opens in 1933 with a visit by the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï to Picasso's château in Normandy, Boisgeloup, where he would take his iconic photographs of the celebrated plaster busts of Picasso's lover Marie-Thérèse Walter. The beautifully illustrated, long-awaited final volume of John Richardson's magisterial Life of Picasso, drawing on original research from interviews and never-before-seen material in the Picasso family archives.

A life of picasso volume 4