The stories we quell

The fine art of gossiping about fine artists

anecdotes that Picasso passed on to Jacqueline and she passed on to him.

Gossips are the descendants of the ancient troubadours who created the art of narrative while including in their ballads all the tastiest facts about the upper classes. In our day the ideal gossip is someone who could probably be a novelist or scriptwriter but decided long ago that telling delicious stories is far more pleasurable than creating literature. Unfortunately, classic gossips are inadequately appreciated because most people fail to see how their imaginative storytelling gives structure to ordinary life, enriching us all by charging commonplace events with drama.

There is no better place for a talented gossip than the art world, where the power of money meets the power of art in an atmosphere defined by frantic desire and allconsuming narcissism. Andy Warhol, the most successful as well as the most famous member of his generation of American painters, was so dedicated a gossip that he wrote a book consisting of nothing but tapes of telltale conversations with his friends, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again. Then he started a magazine, Interview, filled with little but gossip. It was edited for 18 years by Ingrid Sischy, until Interview itself exploded in a burst of gossip when Sischy and the publisher’s ex-wife, Sandra Brant, declared their romantic and business partnership and decamped for Vanity Fair. It was a post-modern event, meta-gossip.

In the Picasso books, Richardson stages his subject’s life as a series of conflicts, mainly the conflicts within Picasso that determined how he depicted his current Muse. Richardson sees all paintings of women in relation to what he knows is happening in Picasso’s life. He’s the opposite of a formalist critic, never neglecting

In the Picasso books, Richardson stages his subject’s life as a series of conflicts

the quality of the work but always searching for what it says about Picasso and what Picasso’s personal history says about the art. Sometimes the drama turns into a horror story, as happens when (in Volume Three) we reach the point where Picasso has grown to dislike his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, whom he married in 1918.

In January, 1927, at age 45, Picasso notices a 17-year-old blond shopping in the Galeries Lafayette. She has “cobalt-blue eyes and a precociously voluptuous body.” This is MarieThérèse Walter, who is soon to have a term of nine years as Muse No. 3.

“I am Picasso,” he says to her, but she’s not heard of him. He takes her to a bookstore and shows her a book about him. While continuing his marriage to Olga he sets MarieThérèse up in an apartment and becomes her lover.He continues to paint Olga, but in his work she grows ugly and even terrifying. As Richardson says, she becomes “a scrawny succubus, with eyes sewn onto her cheeks like buttons and a dagger-sharp tongue protruding from her gaping mouth.” She’s goggle-eyed, she looks manic and decrepit.

Not everyone likes this way of analyzing Picasso. T.J. Clark, a British Marxist academic, takes pains to damn Richardson’s approach in a book published this month, Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (Princeton University Press). Clark claims that “secondrate celebrity literature” says nothing of interest about the substance of Picasso’s work. He accuses Richardson of “drowning a picture in gossip.”

Clark’s book itself will inspire much gossip. Picasso himself understood exactly what he was doing and the human effects of his work. “How awful,” he once said to Richardson, “for a woman to realize from my work that she is being supplanted.” That sentence, whether T.J. Clark likes it or not, goes some distance toward justifying the value of artistic gossip. Has anyone ever more thoroughly condemned himself in just 15 words?