A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932

A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932
by John Richardson

A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932
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Book Summary Information

Author: John Richardson
Edition: Hardcover
Published: 2007-11-13
ISBN: 0307266656
Number of pages: 608
Publisher: Knopf

Book Reviews of A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932

Book Review: Picasso Part 3
Summary: 4 Stars

I love Picasso and to read about him as a regular guy living his life is very revealing in that he is human as well as a protean god of Art. Loved this book as it continues the story along. The only real criticism I have of J. Richardson is that it seems he's in a rush. Quite a difference from the slow but sure tone of the first two books. It seems for some reason that he went in and took out a lot of stuff some stupid editor told him was too much for any one to care about. Wrong. I sure hope he finishes the proposed 7 volume series but for as long as it is taking him to write it, well, I will keep my fingers crossed because he writes in a honest way the story of one man who changed the world.

Summary of A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932

The long-awaited third volume of John Richardson’s definitive biography of Pablo Picasso combines the critical astuteness, exhaustive research, and stunning narrative that made the first two volumes an art-historical breakthrough as well as a pleasure to read.

The Triumphant Years
takes up the artist’s life in 1917, when Picasso and Cocteau left wartime Paris for Rome to work with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes on their revolutionary production of Parade. Visits to Naples, above all to the Farnese marbles in the Museo Nazionale, would leave Picasso with a lifelong obsession with classical sculpture as well as the self-referential commedia dell’arte. After returning to Paris and marrying one of Diaghilev’s ballerinas, Olga Khokhlova, he abandoned bohemia for the drawing rooms of Paris. Hence, his so-called Duchess period, which coincided with his switch to neoclassicism, and would ultimately be absorbed into a metamorphic form of cubism.

In the summer of 1923, Picasso and his American friends Gerald and Sara Murphy transformed the French Riviera from a winter into a summer resort, when they persuaded the proprietor of the H?tel du Cap at Antibes to keep the place open for the summer. In doing so, they made the Riviera Europe’s major playground. Mediterraneanism was in Picasso’s bones. Born in M?laga, he would always identify with this inland sea.

In 1927 the artist’s life underwent a major change; he abandoned society for a life out of the spotlight with a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl, Marie-Th?r?se Walter. His erotic obsession with Marie-Th?r?se would result in an ever-growing antipathy for his neurasthenic, understandably jealous wife. Balletic clues have enabled Richardson to identify a number of baffling figure-paintings as portrayals of Olga and reinterpret the work of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Picasso’s passionate love for his mistress and his passionate hatred for his wife can be fully understood only in light of each other.

The last three chapters constitute an annus mirabilis—spring 1931 to spring 1932—during which the artist celebrated his fiftieth birthday. Challenged to scale new heights by the passage of time, Picasso lived up to his shamanic belief that painting should have a magic function. In the course of this year, he reinvented sculpture and to a great extent his own imagery in a bid to Picassify the classical tradition. The resultant retrospective in Paris and Zurich in the summer of 1932 confirmed Picasso as the leader of the modern movement.

Picasso, Pablo Books

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