The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
What the voyeur saw in Picasso’s boudoir
A gossipy biography spills the secrets of the artist’s ‘Minotaur’ years
A LIFE OF PICASSO, VOL IV:
THE MINOTAUR YEARS, 1933-1945 by John Richardson
368pp, Jonathan Cape, T £30 (0844 871 1514), RRP £35, ebook £13.99
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When John Richardson died at home in Manhattan in 2019, the fourth volume of his frisky biography of Pablo Picasso was, according to his obituary in The New York Times, “close to completion”. Three years later, The Minotaur Years, considerably slimmer than its predecessors, and focusing, like the second instalment, on just a single decade (1933-43), is finally being published on this side of the Atlantic, with two new collaborators, Ross Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga, namechecked on the title page.
Terrifically enjoyable, it concludes with a well-known remark by Picasso’s lover Dora Maar, the surrealist photographer, who, for much of the period covered by the book, was, as Richardson puts it with a characteristically cosmopolitan flourish, his maîtresse-entitre. After Picasso’s death, Maar – a “complex”, “spiky” character, says Richardson, not averse to the odd “kinky ploy” – explained her turn to Catholicism: “After Picasso, there is only God.” One hopes that Richardson has discovered something similar, in the literary pantheon in the sky.
For Picasso fanatics, as well as devotees of Richardson’s distinctive voice (at once magisterial and indiscreet), The Minotaur Years – so-called because, during the 1930s, the artist became “obsessed” with the monster of Greek myth – offers compulsive reading. How could it be otherwise? The spell under discussion, mostly spanning Picasso’s 50s, yielded one masterpiece after another, from the Vollard Suite of etchings, to the “bleak monochrome modernism” of Guernica, first exhibited at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, to Night Fishing at Antibes (1939).
Then, of course, there was the artist’s sombre output during the war, when, despite harassment by the Gestapo, Picasso remained in Paris, modelling sculptures in his bathroom. Because of a fuel shortage, that was, he told the photographer Brassaï, “the only room you can heat in this big old barn” of his studio-apartment, on the top floors of a 17th-century mansion in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Richardson, who befriended Picasso after moving to Provence in the 1950s, is a master scene-setter and raconteur, capable of deftly introducing characters with a few strokes of his pen. His brisk narrative effortlessly untangles the complexities of Picasso’s life, moving from the “misery” of his marriage to his Russian wife, Olga, a former ballerina, to his relationships with Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter, who, in 1935, bore him a daughter, Maya. Surprisingly, for someone so macho, Picasso even changed the odd nappy.
Nimbly, Richardson also switches between grand panoramic history, precising the terrifying convulsions of the 1930s that inspired Picasso’s anti-fascist art (his description of the Luftwaffe’s annihilation of the Basque town of Guernica is especially devastating in light of the atrocities in Ukraine), and more private moments, such as the orgiastic summers that Picasso passed with a glamorous crew of confidantes and lovers in the south of France during the second half of the 1930s.
Here, we encounter the artist in frolicsome mode, teaching tricks to a monkey that he picked up in a Mougins pet shop and christened Beretzof, and “ranting” like Hitler,
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while holding a black toothbrush to his upper lip. Throughout, an impression of intimacy is sustained by scores of astonishingly personal black-and-white snapshots, many reproduced for the first time.
Indeed, at various points, Richardson casts Picasso’s “obsessively discreet” adviser and secretary, the Catalan poet Jaime Sabartés, whom he describes as the artist’s “whipping boy”, as a sort of authorial foil – rejecting his “detailed” memoir as “inaccurate” because it omitted any reference to Picasso’s mistresses.
Of course, spying through the keyhole of Picasso’s bedroom door is, in a sense, the USP of Richardson’s fundamentally voyeuristic approach. And, if you’re into that sort of thing, The Minotaur Years contains several juicy details about Picasso’s sex life, such as the enjoyment he supposedly derived during lovemaking of denying one partner “the joy of orgasm for as long as possible”. Part of the fun of reading Richardson is that he’s such a gossip.
Yet, since 1991, when the first volume of his biography appeared, things have changed – and tonally, as well as art historically, his method now feels, perhaps, out of step. Mostly, he considers Picasso’s pictures and sculptures as so many codes and puzzles to be cracked or solved with biographical information; it is, in large part, thanks to Richardson that we still break up Picasso’s prodigious output into distinct periods, each associated with a particular mistress. Younger art historians, however, have moved away from this fixation with his partners.
Is this because Picasso, invariably kind with animals, could be so cruel to people? (As well as Beretzof, the cast list of The Minotaur Years includes Kazbek, Picasso’s emaciated, sharp-snouted Afghan hound, who inspired a series of “unflattering” portraits of Maar.)
I don’t know if Richardson was a misogynist, but he seems happy to repeat others’ misogyny without much interrogation. Dismissed in the book’s second sentence as a “termagant”, Olga (Richardson has a patronising habit of referring to Picasso’s partners by their first names), is both “boring” and a “madwoman”; Dora, as depicted in Night Fishing at Antibes, licks “testicular scoops of ice cream with a pointed blue tongue”; while Marie-Thérèse (whose fingers, in a group of erotic drawings from 1934, appear “turdlike” to Richardson) is “immature” and “ordinary” – “except in bed”. A different, more empathetic biographer, beginning now, might work harder to get inside Olga’s head, as well as that of her and Picasso’s “troubled” son, Paulo.
Moreover, four volumes in, Richardson’s formulaic analysis of Picasso’s art can pall. In general, a little more evidence to back up all the imperious assertions would have been nice; likewise, a stronger argument to reinforce Richardson’s peremptory praise for Picasso’s free-form poetry of the mid-30s, when, slumped in “depression”, he abandoned painting. Loftily, Richardson informs us that Picasso was “a formidable surrealist poet” who bears comparison to James Joyce. After reading the garbled excerpts quoted here, you can make up your own mind.
Still, The Minotaur Years remains, in many ways, irresistible. And, as the mood darkens, the final chapters, evoking the “agony” and “dreariness” of life in occupied Paris, are a tour de force – when, as Richardson puts it pithily, Picasso’s paintings no longer “titillate; they bite”.
Surprisingly for someone so macho, Picasso even changed the odd nappy