It was “after seeing at first-hand how closely Picasso’s personal life and art impinged on each other” that Richardson decided, in the early 1960s, how he wanted to approach the writing of the biography: “Since the successive images Picasso devised for his women always permeated his style, I proposed to concentrate on portraits of wives and mistresses. The advantage is that Richardson and, by extension, we have intimate access to the painter not only at the easel but at home and at the bullfight and on the run from one lover to another, and on, and on. Richardson’s biography would be no studiedly dry academic treatise, but a portrait of the artist by a longtime friend. From Cooper’s chateau near Avignon, they would “drive over to Vallauris, where Picasso lived in an ugly little villa, called La Galloise, hidden away behind a garage.” Already here we have a taste of what was to come. He met Picasso in 1948 through the English art collector Douglas Cooper, Richardson’s lover at the time. Richardson was well placed to write the life of this larger-than-life creature. “The artist came across as an ancient Grock, who had had his day,” Richardson wrote of Picasso in his first volume, “instead of a great artist in the throes of an exultant regeneration.” What a circus it must have been, with that little black-eyed demon as ringmaster. There was a certain pathos in all this: Jean Cocteau, the painter’s old friend and toady, was master of the revels at La Californie, the large villa in Cannes where Picasso lived in the 1950s, but no one was in any doubt as to who was in control. One of the most significant loves of his life, the painter Françoise Gilot, used to address him as “Monseigneur,” and treated as a king in all his majesty the artist who had once signed a self-portrait “ Yo el rey”-and he wasn’t joking.
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After all, he was one of the great showmen of the century, and, as every showman knows, the show must go on, and on, and on, with frequent applications of the whip to the backs of the panting performers. It was all rather baffling, but the experts are the experts, and Picasso’s supremacy was, and remains, unassailable. People everywhere, including those who knew nothing of painting, knew the creator of Guernica, widely accepted as the quintessential prewar masterpiece, and of the violently distorted portraits of women, and of weeping women in particular, that critics declared objects of surpassing beauty. 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.
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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.
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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.