Now available in paperback
Julian Bell writes:The epithet ‘triumphant’ in the title of the new volume of John Richardson’s magnum opus has a brash, swaggering ring: fittingly so. This is the tale of an extremely rich and famous man who came pretty near to doing whatever he wanted. The Picasso of the 1920s was physically strong and socially supple: he could charm the king of Spain, mesmerise Proust, shrug off Hemingway. He was news wherever he appeared and yet able to seal himself away in an expansive private freedom. One hand might distribute lordly largesse, the other remained clenched tight around those bundles of assets – ‘no different from the country bumpkin who keeps his savings sewn into his mattress,’ as Zervos remarked. Nothing impeded him when he ‘felt the need for a country house’, as Richardson puts it, or when he felt like taking his teenage mistress to amusement parks along with the son of his marriage. Six-year-old Paulo was already ‘sufficiently loyal to his father not to betray him to his mother’. The vastly successful and productive middle-aged Picasso may be a subject for awe; he does not invite compassion.
(LRB 3 January 2008)
Cape | hardback
592 pp. |ISBN:
9780224031219
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