John Richardson

NEW YORK—The critic and journalist John Richardson is in the midst of one of the greatest ongoing works of art history — a multivolume biography of Pablo Picasso. Already spanning some 30 years, the undertaking has so far produced three thick, critically lauded volumes: Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881–1906, published in 1991; Life of Picasso: The Painter of Modern Life, 1907–1917, from 1996; and most recently, Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932, published in fall 2007. The author reports that he is already at work on a fourth volume, but at 84, he freely admits that he may have trouble completing the biography.

If Life of Picasso has consumed Richardson’s late years, during the first half of his life he was no less immersed in art. The decade of the 1950s he spent, more or less, in Provence, as a companion to cubist collector Douglas Cooper and member of Picasso’s inner circle. After moving to New York in 1960, he organized exhibitions of work by Picasso and Braque. In 1964, he was named head of Christie’s U.S. operations, and in 1971, he became vice president in charge of 19th and 20th century painting at Knoedler and Co. gallery in New York. He later became managing director of Artemis, a mutual fund specializing in works of art. Richardson has written about all of this, producing, in addition to the Picasso biography, a memoir, a book of essays, books on Braque and Manet, and numerous articles for such publications as Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. All in all, it adds up to fascinating career that shows that a single person can inhabit a number of art-world guises: from library-bound art historian to artist’s confidant, from auction house director to private collector.

And Richardson shows no signs of slowing down. A full-time writer since 1980, he made news earlier this spring when he decided to foray once again into a more public art-world role, this time as a special advisor for a new uptown Gagosian Gallery branch specializing in 20th-century art.

Last month, Richardson interrupted his busy schedule to speak to ARTINFO about Picasso, his role with Gagosian, the latest breed of rich collectors, and the difficulty of funding a labor of love.   

John, congratulations on your newest book. I remember reading that your Life of Picasso was originally planned for three volumes in total.

Originally it was planned for one volume and then it became two volumes. And then it became four volumes, of which I have done three.

But you’ve only gone up to 1932, and Picasso lived until 1973.

Alas, yes.

Do you think you can wrap it up in a single book?

Yes and no. I’m 84, so my age is a factor. There’s a lot of work to be done, and I may not live to end it. On the other hand, what I intend to do is find one or two more people to help me. I have sight problems, so I need a considerable amount of help.

Whatever else I do, I want to describe the years when I was a witness. I came into Picasso’s life around 1950, but I didn’t start seeing him regularly until 1952. In the 1950s, Douglas Cooper and I had a house in Provence, and Picasso would come over whenever there was a bullfight, and we would visit him in Cannes.

Is there an expected publication date?

No.

With a multivolume biography, the endpoint of each book determines a mini-narrative. The first volume ends as Picasso is struggling with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907); the second with the end of his hermetic cubism and his embarking on the collaborative project Parade; the third with the first full-scale retrospective of his work, in 1932. If you were to carve up Picasso’s life into four chapters, would you end each chapter where you’ve ended these three books?

In the case of the last volume, I intended to end it with Guernica (1937), or even World War II. But there just was too much stuff, and the book would have become too long and too heavy. And I think that Guernica is more appropriate as a beginning than an end.

But I also realized that everybody had overlooked the importance of the retrospective in 1932 in Paris and in Zurich, and that no one understood the enormous significance of Picasso’s 50th birthday, in 1931. The moment one began to see the work of 1929, 1930, 1931 in light of his 50th birthday, it all took on a very different aspect.