Books

The canonisation of Picasso does a disservice to the women who suffered for his art

by MIRANDA FRANCE

Georges Braque once described his artistic collaboration with Pablo Picasso as: “like mountain-climbers roped together.” The image is striking, not only because it gracefully evokes the excitement of inventing Cubism, a revolution in art and philosophy, but also because it places companionship at the heart of that discovery. We usually think of Picasso not as a collaborator, but as someone who scaled the heights of genius and fame alone, from his prodigious childhood to his much-photographed old age. In 1939, Time suggested his name was synonymous with the idea of modern art, and 80 years on the observation is no less true. Picasso’s genius spawned a dizzying industry and much personal mayhem. The people who knew him, worked for him or slept with him often gave their lives over to him too. Many of them wrote fawning or furious memoirs. Several killed themselves. His granddaughter Marina said it took 15 years of therapy to get over being related to him.

The British art historian John Richardson got to know Picasso in the early 1950s, when he and his partner, the art collector Douglas Cooper, lived nearby in the south of France. Cooper had a collection of Cubist art and Picasso often visited to look at it, or invited the men for lunch and to tour his studio. Sometimes he brought them a piece he’d been working on as a present— a drawing, ceramic or print. A token gift from Picasso could change your life.

The artist was encouraging when Richardson proposed a book analysing Picasso’s creative process through his portraits of women. In the end, though, Richardson decided on a fuller biography, “one that would set the artist’s life and work in relation to each other and in the broader context of cultural history.” The first volume of A Life of Picasso came out in 1991, with three further volumes following at increasingly lengthy intervals, the last of which is now published posthumously. Richardson died in 2019 before he could finish his monumental project.

Volume IV, The Minotaur Years, stretches from 1933 to 1943, taking Picasso up to the age of 61 (he died 30 years later, in 1973). It was written with the help of two collaborators when Richardson was in his eighties and nineties and losing his sight. Unfortunately, those pressures show. In earlier volumes, Richardson comes across as a lucid but sceptical admirer, confidently debunking the myths that have been so attractive to other biographers. By contrast, The Minotaur Years, while covering one of Picasso’s most productive decades and offering valuable observations, sometimes feels slapdash. Casual sexism makes parts of it hard to read without harrumphing. Previously Richardson has described what it was like to spend a day with Picasso: “you suffered from total nervous exhaustion. You felt that he had taken every last atom of feeling out of you, and then he would go off in his studio at midnight and work all night at the age of 80 on your energy and love.” Here there are few such insights and the anecdotes seem insubstantial or gossipy. For example, Richardson learns from someone who used to be Picasso’s gardener that the artist “loved vegetables, especially peas, potatoes and carrots if they were picked very young.” So now you know.