John Richardson

© 2007 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Pablo Picasso and John Richardson at Chateau de Vauvenargues, 1959

Photo by Jason Wyche

Picasso biographer John Richardson

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The fact that I knew him well and he opened up to me.

I set out to do something that couldn’t be done in Picasso’s lifetime by people close to him. This applies particularly to Roland Penrose, my compatriot, who wrote the first major biography of Picasso. It’s an excellent work, but Roland was a very loyal friend, and he left out all the dark parts. It’s a book without shadows.

I wanted to say all the things that Picasso, who was exceedingly secretive, kept quiet about in his lifetime. I don’t mean scandalous things. Picasso didn’t like people asking a lot of embarrassing questions or digging too deep into his psyche, into his manner of working.

I saw him regularly over a period of about 10 years and he relaxed with me — I was young; 25 in 1949. Picasso was astonishingly kind and generous to me, because I think he realized — in fact, I know he realized — that I had an obsession with his work and that I intuitively knew what he was up to.

At what point did you conceive of the biography?

Originally, I wanted to do a book on Picasso’s portraits. Dora Maar, who was Picasso’s mistress from 1936 to 1945, said to me that when the woman in Picasso’s life changed, everything else would change — the style, the house, the poet, the circle of friends, the dog, the food, you name it — and that this was reflected above all in the portraits. Picasso was amused by the idea — this was in 1960-61 — and he gave me a lot of information.  

Soon after I got to New York, I organized a nine-gallery show [in 1962]. Nine of the biggest galleries in New York each took a different period of Picasso’s life. Picasso was very helpful, and I began to see the development in terms of the various women. Then I thought, “Oh hell, that’s all very well, but why not just write a biography.”

I want to share an observation that I’ve had about the writing style. It seems that you’ve created a fact-driven, nuts-and-bolts narrative that avoids certain novelistic techniques. There’s little attempt to get inside Picasso’s head or to dramatize certain situations. And unlike in many biographies of artists, there isn’t much art theory —

Picasso loathed theory, or rather distrusted it.

I didn’t keep theory out of my book, but I kept it in its place. In the third volume I redefined Picasso’s relationship to the Surrealists. None of the recent exhibitions devoted to Picasso and Surrealism face up to the fact that Picasso had a deep distrust of Bretonian surrealism, with its emphasis on Freud and Marx, dream states, and automatic techniques. So much for theory.

Insofar as anyone can with a great artist, I did my best to identify the roots of his imagery.

But that’s different from getting into his head, from opening up his mental processes. You give a great sense of who he was, but this comes out of a cumulative effect of the description of what he was working on, of small daily events.

Well, Picasso said to me more than once, “My work is a diary, and it should be seen as such.” And that’s what I did.

Picasso took pride in being a paradox. He was consciously a paradox, and plays up his paradoxical sides, which makes things extremely difficult for a writer. I realized fairly early on that whatever you say about Picasso, the reverse is often equally true. I don’t think anyone before had faced up to certain facts. For instance, the curiously bourgeois streak in Picasso in the midst of his bohemianism. But again that’s part of the paradox.

I understand that the funding for the book has been a challenge. I’ve heard that the image costs have been greater than the sales revenues. Is it true that you published two books between volumes two and three in part to raise money?

Well, it’s partly correct. Far more to the point, Picasso was extremely generous to me and gave me a number of drawings and prints and other things, virtually all of which have had to be sold to pay for the book. It wasn’t the illustrations so much — although the charge for copyright and for royalties is considerable — but the research, travel, books. And the advances from my publishers weren’t nearly enough to keep me going for the ten years volume three took to write. In the end, my friend Mrs. Sid Bass came to my rescue and got a lot of her collector friends to contribute to the John Richardson Fund for Picasso Research, and that’s what’s kept this labor of love going.