Word: richardson
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...lives. But with Picasso, who viewed his art as a diary, the life is the best key to the work. And the work is suffused with the man's traits: his extreme machismo, his predatory eye (the Andalusian mirada fuerte, or gaze of power, which, as Richardson rightly argues, was one of Picasso's fetishes), his belief in the magic power of images, his emotional cannibalism, his charisma and sardonic wit. Richardson shows how these developed in the young Picasso while debunking such legends as the notion that he drew like a child prodigy, a visual Mozart...
...brings Picasso from childhood through the Blue and Rose periods, stopping in 1907 just as the 25-year-old artist was souping himself up (under the influence of El Greco) to produce what would turn out to be the emblematic radical painting of the century, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Richardson is a born storyteller, with a vivid sense of detail and character that enables him to deal with the large cast of players entangled in Picasso's early life, from obscure Catalan artists, shady French art dealers and questing Russian collectors to writers like Alfred Jarry, Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire...
...Richardson's account of such figures has to be the most readable description of the avant-garde milieu of 1900s Paris since Roger Shattuck's classic work, The Banquet Years. But they are not there as mere background; their impact on Picasso, their role in the formation of his ideas and imagery, is carefully assessed. One sees, for instance, what Picasso's work got from his "odd couple" friendship with his diametric opposite, the mercurial, spiritually obsessed Jewish homosexual Jacob: it was the vein of mystical imagery, the fascination with arcana, the tarot and the figure of the artist...
...Richardson explores areas left untouched by earlier writers. Picasso and his girlfriend Fernande Olivier, for example, spent a good deal of their time between 1904 and 1908 high on opium, but the relevance of this to the empty- eyed, dreaming waif figures of the Rose Period had gone unnoted before. He does much to clear up the vexed question of Picasso's politics, pointing out -- contrary to recent theses on the subject -- that the anarchist ideas loose in the air of Barcelona had next to no provable effect on his work, and that as a young artist he was timorously...
...along the way, Richardson gives a richly informed and lucid account of the dynamics of Picasso's growth, neither sparing his failures nor losing sight of his quintessential Spanishness. The story pulls like a locomotive and can only gather more energy in volumes to come. If its promise is sustained, Richardson will be to Picasso what Richard Ellmann has been to Joyce, or Richard Holmes to Coleridge...