
Sir John Patrick Richardson, KBE, was a British art historian and Picasso biographer. The elder son of Sir Wodehouse Richardson, he was sent to board at two successive schools after his father's death in 1929. When he was thirteen he became a boarder at Stowe school, where he admired the architecture and landscape and was taught something about the work of Picasso and other innovative painters. After bring invalided out of the army in the Second World War, he worked in London as an industrial designer and became friends with the painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. In 1949 Richardson met the art historian and collector Douglas Cooper and the two began a relationship that would last ten years. In 1952, he moved with Cooper to Provence, where he met a number of artists, including Pablo Picasso. In 1960, Richardson left Cooper and moved to New York, where he worked in the art world until retiring in 1980 to concentrate full time on writing. The first volume of his biography of Picasso was published in 1991, with subsequent volumes published in 1996 and 2007. In 2012, Richardson was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) for his services to art. Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
by John Richardson
Rating: 4.2 ⭐
• 2 recommendations ❤️
In the second volume of his Life of Picasso , Richardson reveals the young Picasso in the Baudelairean role of “the painter of modern life.” Never before have Picasso’s revolutionary vision, technical versatility, prodigious achievements, and, not least, his sardonic humor been analyzed with such clarity.Hence his great breakthrough painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , with which this book opens. As well as portraying Picasso as a revolutionary, Richardson analyzes the more compassionate side of his genius. The misogynist of posthumous legend turns out to have been surprisingly vulnerable—more often sinned against than sinning. Heartbroken at the death of his mistress Eva, Picasso tried desperately to find a wife. Richardson recounts the untold story of how his two great loves of 1915–17 successively turned him down. These disappointments, as well as his horror at the outbreak of World War I and the wounds it inflicted on his closest friends, Braque and Apollinaire, shadowed his painting and drove him off to work for the Ballets Russes in Rome and Naples—back to the ancient world.In this volume we see the artist’s life and work during the crucial decade of 1907–17, a period during which Picasso and Georges Braque devised what has come to be known as cubism and in doing so engendered modernism. Thanks to the author’s friendship with Picasso and some of the women in his life, as well as Braque and their dealer, D. H. Kahnweiler, and other associates, he has had access to untapped sources and unpublished material. In The Cubist Rebel, Richardson also introduces us to key figures in Picasso’s life who have been totally overlooked by previous biographers. Among these are the artist’s Chilean patron, collector, and mother figure, Eugenia Errázuriz, as well as two fiancé the loveable Geneviève Laporte and the promiscuous bisexual painter Irène Lagut.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 fresh light to bear on the artist’s private life, he has succeeded in coming up with a new view of this paradoxical man and of his paradoxical work. Never before have Picasso’s revolutionary vision, technical versatility, prodigious achievements, and, not least, his sardonic humor been analyzed with such clarity.
by John Richardson
Rating: 4.3 ⭐
• 1 recommendation ❤️
From the foremost Picasso scholar, the first volume of his Life of Picasso draws on Richardson's close friendship with Picasso, his own diaries, the collaboration of Picasso's widow Jacqueline, and unprecedented access to Picasso's studio and papers to arrive at a profound understanding of the artist and his work.Combining meticulous scholarship with irresistible narrative appeal, this definitive biography of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century details the years 1881-1906, from Picasso's beginnings in Spain to age twenty-five in Paris. With more than 800 extraordinary black-and-white illustrations.
Famed Picasso biographer and art historian Sir John Richardson opens the doors of residences from his life, revealing an autobiographical sketch through handsomely decorated rooms filled with art, antiques, and intriguing mementoes, each with a special story.John Richardson's Bohemian Aristocrat interiors are, and have been throughout his life, filled with fine English and American antiques; interesting textiles; works of art by friends, legendary artists Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol, and Robert Mapplethorpe; vivid color combinations; and objects that prompt stories from a well-lived life. From London and the stately buildings of Stowe School, in the idyllic Buckinghamshire countryside, to the south of France, New York City, and the Connecticut countryside, Richardson shares the story of his life through places, objects, and people--a form of autobiography, gloriously illustrated, entertainingly told.In stories about his residences in the south of France (at the Ch�teau de Castille with celebrated art historian and collector Douglas Cooper), London (a set of rooms at the famed Albany apartment house), and the United States (glamorous New York City apartments and a country retreat in Connecticut), Richardson reveals his life through a m�lange of interesting places, mementoes, works of art, furnishings that prompt stories, and an endlessly fascinating assortment of friends and acquaintances--Fernand L�ger, Lady Diana Cooper, Fran Lebowitz, and Oscar and Annette de la Renta, to name a few. Essential reading for those interested in twentieth-century art and social history, grandly livable interiors, and the good life.
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 Hôtel 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 Málaga, 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-Thérèse Walter. His erotic obsession with Marie-Thérèse 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.
The spectacular fourth volume of Picasso's life set in Paris, Normandy, and Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and WWII.Based on original and exhaustive research from interviews and never-before-seen material in the Picasso family archives, Volume IV describes a wildly productive decade for Picasso: his ongoing involvement with the surrealists Man Ray, Dali, Paul Eluard and Andr� Breton on his Skira-backed magazine Minotaur; summers spent in the south of France at Juan-les-Pins and Mougins with the surrealists and their wives and girlfriends; the making of Minotauromachie; living in Nazi-occupied Paris, labeled a degenerate, prevented from exhibiting his work. During these years, Picasso, at long last, would legally separate from his wife Olga and their son Paulo would be sent to a Swiss clinic for therapy and rehab; Marie-Th�r�se would remain Picasso's mistress, but a stormy relationship with the photographer Dora Maar would be part of the mix, while Alice Paalen and Valentine Hugo would come and go. It is also the time in which Picasso would paint his masterwork, Guernica, unveiled at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris.Richardson tells Picasso's story through the art of this period, analyzing how it reflects the tenor of the artist's day-to-day life. The fascinating, accessible narrative immerses the reader in one of the most exciting artistic moments in twentieth century cultural history, and makes a groundbreaking contribution to the scholarship of the field.
by John Richardson
Rating: 4.0 ⭐
John Richardson's riveting memoir about growing up in England and, at twenty-five, beginning his twelve-year adventure with the controversial art collector Douglas Cooper.With a new introduction by Jed Perl, here is John Richardson's richly entertaining memoir of his life with the brilliant but difficult British art expert Douglas Cooper--a fiendish, colorful, Evelyn Waugh-like figure who single-handedly assembled the world's most important private collection of Cubist paintings. John Richardson tells the story of their ill-fated but comical association, which began in London in 1949 when Richardson was twenty-five and moved onto the Ch�teau de Castille, the famous colonnaded folly in Provence that they restored and filled with masterpieces by Picasso, Braque, L�ger, and Juan Gris. Richardson unfurls a fascinating adventure through twelve years, encompassing famous artists and writers, collectors and other celebrities--Francis Bacon, Jean Cocteau, Luis Miguel Domingu�n, Dora Maar, Peggy Guggenheim, and Henri Matisse, to name only a few. And central to the book is Richardson's close friendship with Picasso, which coincided with the emergence of the artist's new mistress, Jacqueline Roque, and gave Richardson an inside view of the repercussions she would have on Picasso's life and work.With an eye for detail, an ear for scandal, and a sparkling narrative style, Richardson has written a unique, fast-paced saga of modernism behind the scenes.
by John Richardson
Rating: 3.9 ⭐
Robert Hughes has described Richardson's multivolume biography of Picasso as "a masterpiece in the making." In this collection of his best shorter pieces, culled from more than thirty years' artistic and literary commentary and reviews, Richardson demonstrates the same dazzling narrative style that has earned him the reputation as one of our foremost biographers.As a contributor to Vanity Fair, The New York Review of Books, House and Garden , and The New Yorker , John Richardson has a reputation for stimulating readers with his frank, discerning characterizations of art-world personalities as well as celebrities from a variety of other milieus-- people such as Truman Capote, Armand Hammer, Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol, and Peggy Guggenheim.As readers await the third volume of A Life of Picasso , they will be diverted by this witty, wonderfully intelligent collection of approximately thirty essays, extensively revised and updated for this publication, each of which is illustrated with artwork or photographs.
With many never-before-published photographs taken by the artist, as well as paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, and films, this volume offers an unparalleled examination of Pablo Picasso’s relationship to photography.
A renowned gallerist and collector, the late Ileana Sonnabend acquired an impressive collection of seminal work directly from the Warhol studio at the time of its making. Sonnabend was an early and fervent supporter of Warhol, and held three important exhibitions of his work at her Paris gallery, including the series Death and Disasters (1964), Flowers (1965), and Thirteen Most Wanted Men (1967). This beautifully illustrated book includes essays by Picasso biographer John Richardson and leading Warhol scholar Brenda Richardson, who was a close friend of Sonnabend’s. Her essay is an insightful portrait of the highly regarded dealer and her relationship with Warhol. The book is illuminated by previously unpublished private letters and includes stand-alone facsimile reproductions of the exhibition catalogues, originally published by Galerie Ileana Sonnabend.
by John Richardson
by John Richardson
by John Richardson
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This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfectionssuch as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact,or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections,have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed worksworldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition ++++Botanical Appendix To Captain Franklin's Narrative Of A Journey To The Shores Of The Polar Sea; Issue 17823 Of CIHM/ICMH Microfiche Series; Issue 17823 Of CIHM/ICMH Collection De MicrofichesSir John RichardsonPrinted by W. Clowes, 1823Science; Life Sciences; Botany; Botany; Botany Arctic regions; Botany Northwest Territories; Plants; Plants Classification; Science / Life Sciences / Botany
by John Richardson
A tribute to the renowned Picasso biographer Sir John Richardson (1924-2019), whose intimate account of the artist's life forever changed the understanding of Picasso's art.The inspiration of nearly all his work comes from his daily life, the acclaimed Picasso biographer John Richardson wrote of the artist in 1962. This was nowhere more true than in Picasso's portraits of women. This volume traces the artist's depictions of eight women who played a prominent role in the artist's life and art: Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova Picasso, Sara Murphy, Marie-Th�r�se Walter, Dora Maar, Fran�oise Gilot, Sylvette David, and Jacqueline Roque Picasso. Each woman served as a catalyst for experiments in color and form that would continue to change as the contours of the relationship shifted. It is through this process that Picasso's work was constantly reinvented and renewed.Published in association with an exhibition organized in honor of the late art historian and biographer, this book features reproductions of thirty-six paintings and sculptures; an extensive two-part newspaper article by Richardson written in 1962, Picasso in Private; and an illustrated chronology of the extraordinary exhibitions of Picasso's work curated by Richardson at Gagosian between 2009 and 2018.
by John Richardson
BEAUTIFUL PHOTOGRAPHS OF PICASSO'S PAINTINGS
by John Richardson
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by John Richardson