Biographer’s final Picasso book highly anticipated

NEW YORK — In the fall of 2018, art historian John Richardson fell critically ill and died the following March, at age 95. He left behind a distinguished record as a critic, curator and biographer, and questions about the fate of one of the art world’s longest awaited volumes, his fourth and final book on Pablo Picasso.

Shelley Wanger, his editor at Alfred A. Knopf, said she and Richardson had been working “on a typed manuscript” that they would review together when she came to see him each week. By the time he was hospitalized, they had what she calls “essentially a finished manuscript,” save for end notes, illustrations and some additional research.

Richardson’s “A Life of Picasso: The Minotaur Years,” which comes out Nov. 16, completes a project he began more than 30 years ago with “The Prodigy” and continued with “The Cubist Rebel” and “The Triumphant Years.”

Like Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson series, Richardson’s books have been a story of testing and rewarding the patience of readers and critics. Each volume took years to complete — “The Triumphant Years” came out in 2007. Each was praised in every way a biographer could ask for — for his prose and for his knowledge, for his singular appreciation of Picasso’s achievements and, despite a personal friendship with Picasso and family members, for his willingness to document the artist’s most troubling flaws.

“I think his are the most important of the Picasso biographies,” says Picasso’s grandson

Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, co-president of the art foundation FABA, which includes some of his grandfather’s works. He noted that Richardson benefited from knowing not just the artist but Jean Cocteau and other friends and peers.

“He had a much larger, wider picture (than other biographers) of what everyone was doing. It wasn’t only facts because facts can be kind of boring. What you have is accuracy and insight.”

“The Minotaur Years” covers 1933-43, when the Spanish artist was in his 50s and confronting the spread of fascism and Nazi Germany in Europe. He was ever impatient and in transition, exploring new styles and art forms, whether surrealistic poetry, the mythological drawings that give the book its title, or the epic antiwar painting “Guernica,” his famous response to the 1937 Italian and German bombing of the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

Picasso was also, as ever, in transition in his private life. He was estranged from his wife, the Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova, and spending much of his time with other women, notably the poet-photographer Dora Maar, who met the artist in 1935 and became his lover and inspiration for numerous paintings.

Wanger says the book will be “the most comprehensive treatment of Picasso’s life and work in the 1930s and early ’40s.” It will include previously unpublished correspondence with, among others, his wife and with the poet (and Picasso lover) Alice Rahon. Richardson also drew upon his conversations with Maar and with the son of Pablo and Olga Picasso, Paolo Picasso.

One of the researchers for “The Minotaur Years,” Ross

Finocchio, said Richardson was “satisfied with the ending of the book.” But it does reflect Richardson’s declining physical powers. The fourth volume is around 300 pages, by far the shortest of his Picasso biographies, and his failing eyesight made writing and reviewing documents an increasingly slow process.

Delays in “The Minotaur Years” were also caused by Richardson’s otherwise ageless energy. Starting in 2008, as a consultant to the Gagosian gallery, he helped present six Picasso exhibitions praised by The New York Times’ Roberta Smith as among the best art shows of the 21st century. Richardson was able not only to present rarely seen Picasso works, but to gather art from museums and private collectors worldwide.

“John was so much fun,” says Gagosian curator Michael Cary, who worked with Richardson on the Picasso shows. “And while he took everything he did very seriously, he was funny and playful and a storyteller.

“Everything had a story. He could look at one of Picasso’s works and he could narrate and narrate and narrate.”