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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As a subject, the Three Graces is one of the most familiar of classical images. Picasso has taken it and given it so many meanings. He saw the painting as a memorial to his friend Ramon Pichot, and he felt it never should have been called The Dance; it should have been called The Death of Ramon Pichot. So it has this dark sort of spiritual side to it. As a trio of dancers, the painting had a special meaning for Picasso at that moment, as he was deeply involved with the Russian ballet: His wife’s career as a ballerina had been cut short by an accident on the eve of their marriage. The crucified figure in the middle of La Danse happens to have been based on her. I was looking at the painting and I couldn’t figure out why I was so disturbed. There was something going on. And then I saw Picasso, clever old Picasso, using the most familiar image in Christian iconography to give it added spirituality, a dark added meaning.

Were you surprised that he would choose La Danse as his favorite work? Most people would probably guess something like Les Demoiselles or Guernica.

Well, the trouble with Picasso is he was perfectly capable of saying one thing one day and something else the next. So I don’t think one should take [his statement about La Danse] too literally. But I don’t think he would have placed Guernica among his finest paintings. I think it had a slight element of agitprop; it was a sublime poster in some respects. It is an enormously wonderful painting — I’m not knocking it for a moment — but it has more to do with his passion for Spain and his feelings about the Spanish Civil War. And it wasn’t as revolutionary as the Demoiselles d’Avignon, which I think on other occasions he saw as his greatest painting.

Switching topics: What’s your new role with the Gagosian Gallery?

I don’t have a very specific role. I’m a kind of adviser on matters to do with Picasso and other classic 20th-century painters. [Larry] would like to do one or two Picasso exhibitions. Although there have been hundreds and hundreds, there are still quite a lot of subjects well worth investigating.  

There seems to be a lot of interest in establishing a market for late Picasso works these days. Do you think this simply has to do with the short supply of early works, or is there more to it?

I don’t think it’s to do with the short supply of early works. I think it’s to do with a new generation of buyers, hedge-funders and the like, who have an enormous amount of money to spend and little understanding of how to spend it. A hundred years ago, people who made a lot of money spent it on a string of racehorses, a shoot in Scotland, a yacht, a great house with a great chef. Nobody’s going to do that these days. They may have a private jet, but there’s no time for pleasure as there used to be, and having weekend parties and all the rest. So how are these hugely rich people going to spend their money? Buying art is an obvious and easy solution, and it has become a new form of currency.

The new breed of billionaires also want a painting to be an advertisement for themselves, to show that they’ve got a huge amount of money. You know, this is a $20 million painting. And some of them would rather pay a sensational, record sum of money for a painting than get it at a more reasonable price.  

Picasso is such an easy painter to spot. You seldom have to identify his work to people. Especially late Picasso. It’s very very obvious what it is. The paintings tend to be big, colorful, sometimes shocking. They hit you in the eye. And that fulfills a number of the requirements of the billionaire collector today. Picasso was working at such a rate in an attempt to keep the wolves at bay. The work’s quite uneven. There are marvelous paintings and then there are quite a few duds.

Although there’s been a huge amount of buying of late works, there’s been relatively little intelligent writing about them. Gert Schiff wrote best about it. I’ve done some work on it.