Description
Book SynopsisJohn Richardson draws on the same combination of lively writing, critical astuteness, exhaustive research, and personal experience which made a bestseller out of the first volume and vividly recreates the artist's life and work during the crucial decade of 1907-17 - a period during which Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented Cubism and to that extent engendered modernism.
Richardson has had unique access to untapped sources and unpublished material. By harnessing biography to art history, he has managed to crack the code of cubism more successfully than any of his predecessors. And by bringing a fresh light to bear on the artist's often too sensationalised private life, he has succeeded in coming up with a totally new view of this paradoxical man of his paradoxical work. Never before has Picasso's prodigious technique, his incisive vision and not least his sardonic humour been analysed with such clarity.
Trade ReviewJohn Richardson's second volume on Picasso confirms what his first suggested: that this is a masterpiece in the making, the most illuminating biography yet written on a twentieth-century visual artist... A continuous pleasure to read -- Richard Hughes
Magisterial...Richardson's ambitious project dwarfs all previous biographies of Picasso... [He] has a gift for telling pen-portraits and makes vivid an entire gallery of pioneering dealers and early collectors. -- Frances Spalding * Sunday Times *
Richardson covers [the] momentous ten years from 1907 to the end of the First World War with great elegance and quiet authority... What makes the two published volumes so outstanding is the sense of Picasso the man emerging - in all his complexity - alongside the superb analysis of Picasso the artist -- William Boyd * Spectator *
