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.

There have been so many books about Picasso. What makes yours stand out?

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.

You said in an interview with Charlie Rose that your favorite Picasso work was La Danse, and that Picasso said it was his favorite as well. What is it about that work — for each of you?

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.

Isn’t it problematic that you, who are writing what will someday be considered the definitive history of the late Picasso, are simultaneously employed by a gallery that’s working to establish a market for those works?

Well, Picasso is long since dead, and there are so many other dealers who are dealing in Picasso. I think Gagosian is better known as a dealer in contemporary art than a dealer in classic 20th-century art. He pays me a wage for whatever work I do, which is mostly writing prefaces, or that’s what I assume it will be, because we’ve only just started on this arrangement. There’s no conflict of interest there. If I’m ever asked by anybody to do anything that I don’t like or that puts me in an embarrassing situation, I don’t do it. With Larry, who I think is a brilliant dealer and extremely sensitive to what’s going on at the moment, I foresee all kinds of possibilities.

Does he own Picasso’s last painting? I’ve heard that he does.

Gagosian’s painting is often said to be Picasso’s last work. However, the last time I went into the studio at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, shortly before Jacqueline committed suicide [in 1986], there was one painting that obsessed me, Figures (dated May 25, 1972), which is in fact his last painting without any question. It was in the Tate late Picasso show [“Le Dernier Picasso: 1953–1973,” June 1988], and I wrote a special piece about it. It’s not one of those canvases that’s been done in a day, two days. This one has been worked on and worked on. It has this massive layer of paint, and the subject is mysterious. It’s sort of like a snowstorm. It’s about death.

But this is not quite the last painting, either. Because there was a canvas leaning behind it. It was the same size, enormous. And nothing on it . . . but his signature. That’s Picasso being open-ended.

You’ve worked many years in the art market and also as a scholar. Do you think there’s any conflict between the two roles?

I think for some people there would be conflicts. There was never any conflict for me. When it came to writing about works of art, I knew what I thought, I knew what I liked, I was lucky in being close to some of the greatest artists of my time: to Picasso, to Braque, to Leger in France; in England to Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, whom I had known long before they were famous. As yet I wasn’t involved in the commercial side. Artists sensed that and were extremely generous to me. Freud has been very generous to me. He did a portrait of me, which he gave me. Andy Warhol did a portrait of me, which he gave me, and he gave me a lot of other stuff. The only painting Braque gave to me, I had to sell. But for me, the money was important only so far as it enabled me to work without having to go to an office and deal with a lot of extremely antipathetic people.

You’re not concerned with the market’s impact on the art world?

Yes and no. I think it’s a fascinating subject. I keep abreast of the market, but I’m not part of it. By nature, I’m the reverse of a businessman. I have no interest in business: I’m rather horrified by it. When I ran Christie’s, it was as a lover of art. I left the business side to other people.

Do you think there are still people like that in the auction houses and the galleries?

I’ve been out of the art market, until going in with Gagosian, for 25 years probably, ever since I’ve been working on this book. My only rapport with the market was selling things off my walls; selling the Picassos in order to go on not having a job and not being involved in commerce.

Have you managed to hold onto some of your Picassos? I hope you haven’t sold them all.

Only a couple of the drawings he gave me — also a few prints and things. All my other Picassos had to be sold in order to pay the expenses of the biography.