Reclining figure picasso biography richardson

In 1935, the photographer Dora Maar met Picasso and plunged into an affair with him that would very nearly destroy her emotionally, as he encouraged her latent masochism and betrayed her repeatedly with other lovers. Ten years later, after the war and the affair were over, she suffered a mental collapse for which she was treated by Jacques Lacan, that dubious psychoanalyst de ces jours, who, according to John Richardson, “rescued her by transforming her from a surrealist rebel into a devout Catholic conservative.” As Maar herself said, “After Picasso, there is only God.”

These are the closing words in the fourth volume of Richardson’s mammoth biography of Picasso, and are the last we will have from him, for he died in 2019 at the age of 95. Maar’s confession is expressive of the level of slavish veneration Picasso enjoyed in the 1930s and 1940s, when he had ascended to giddy heights of fame and fortune. The veneration came not only from the ever-accumulating bevy of women to whom he attached himself, but also from his jostling circle of acolytes and hangers-on and, indeed, from much of the wider world as well. People everywhere, including those who knew nothing of painting, knew the creator of Guernica, widely accepted as the quintessential prewar masterpiece, and of

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Picasso 1932: Affection Fame Calamity, Tate Contemporary review - a journal in paint?

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Cultivating tabloid demand – Love, Fame, Tragedy – make your mind up aiming launch an attack satis

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A Life of Picasso IV: The Minotaur Years: 1933-1943

Part of the value of Richardson’s work on Picasso—this final volume, published two years after his death in 2019, is the fourth in his biography of the artist—is his painstaking examination of evidence, taking no one, least of all Picasso, at their word ... There are times in Richardson’s book when he is too anxious to join Picasso in his view of the women in his life, referring, for example, to Olga on the very first page as 'a termagant' and insisting on the very last page that Dora Maar, a later lover, 'thrived on punishment.' Still, one of the reasons why Richardson’s life of Picasso is essential is that he is always willing to seek biographical sources for Picasso’s images. He leaves it to the reader to conclude that many of the paintings that are filled with hatred are not among Picasso’s best, that the tensions and high emotions that poisoned his personal life are sometimes too graphically apparent in them, with no room for mystery, or indeed subtlety. He also leaves it to the reader to face the uncomfortable fact that other such paintings have a startling energy, a rich and dynamic power ... this last volume, roughly half the size of the others, can be most usefully read alongside Josep Pala