Beyond Cubism: 'A Life of Picasso'

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"I WANTED TO WRITE the best possible account of Picasso's art and life, taking into account what Picasso always told me: His work was his diary," said John Richardson of the third volume of his monumental "A Life of Picasso."

The 500-page tome, subtitled "The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932," exhaustively covers the great artist's travels, sex life and friendships with Gertrude Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, et al. Richardson's greatest strength, however, is probably the careful, accessible way he analyzes Picasso's prodigious output and roots the artist's "diary" in his daily life. The book is rife with examples of Picasso's work and even includes some 50 pages of color reproductions.

Richardson, set to sign copies of his book and discuss Picasso with the Corcoran's director and president, Paul Greenhalgh, on Monday, spoke with Express about Picasso's relationship with Salvador Dali, the quality of the work he did as an old man and the importance of Picasso's love life to his art.

» EXPRESS: Talk about the last time you saw Pablo Picasso.
» RICHARDSON: Without looking at old diaries, I can't tell you. I saw him all through the late '50s and early '60s. Then I saw him one time later — it must have been the mid-'60s.

» EXPRESS: I love the story about the paintings and the caviar he brought when he came to your house for dinner.
» RICHARDSON:Drawings. God knows Picasso was generous, but the paintings were worth a huge amount of money. But he would bring drawings or prints or little ceramics he made. Then one time he said, "The price of these things is going through the roof! It's much cheaper to bring you a kilo of caviar." I think he only did that once, then went back to bringing drawings or whatever. He had a marvelous sense of humor. He was always full of surprises.

» EXPRESS: A lot of people discount the work Picasso did in his old age, but you argue that his late period was as fertile as his youth, right?
» RICHARDSON:I don't know that I'd use that exact word. There were marvelous things in his late period. He was still trying to break into new frontiers. The engravings and drawings are particularly inventive.

He was shut away into his studio and the studio became his whole world. His first mistress, when he was 13, was an equestrian. He had a roaring affair with her. And there are endless [late period] equestrian drawings. All his past comes back to him and all the painters he admired came back to him — Rembrandt, Delacroix. It's kind of a whole history of art. It's astonishing.

But he was in a hurry — he was in his 80s. The paintings are done in a terrific rush and some of them suffer for this, but the best of them are marvelous. They're full of urgency. He's racing against death and has so much to say.

And nobody's done enough work on them. The early periods have been so studied, analyzed, and interpreted. But the late ones are fascinating, although somewhat uneven.

» EXPRESS: Are you working on the fourth, and last, book now?
» RICHARDSON:Well, I'm thinking about starting it. The thing is, though, that I'm going to be 84 and the last book took 10 years. And this is a much longer period [the last 40 years of Picasso's life, as opposed to the 15 covered in volume three]. It all depends on finding the right collaborator. But we're getting into the time where I knew Picasso, so I've got a lot of personal knowledge about things. I was seeing him on a regular basis in the '50s. So I think I'll be able to dictate a lot of it. We'll see how far we'll go, but I have every intention of doing it.

» EXPRESS: You think you can cover 40 years in one book?
» RICHARDSON:Well, he spent the last years of his life just working. There's not a lot going on. He's surrounded by his memories, with slides of great works, sometimes projected on the wall of one of his studios. He's not traveling around. He's not going out much. He's not involved with the Communist Party or the surrealists. He's having a happy married life. So it's mostly interpretation of these works. I think I could cram it into one volume.

» EXPRESS: I'm glad you brought up the surrealists, because I wanted to ask you what Picasso thought of Dali.
» RICHARDSON:Well, Dali was such a clown that Picasso frequently made fun of him, but he basically had a high regard for Dali. And Dali loved Picasso. They met less and less as the years went on, but he never dismissed Dali, even though Dali's work was not very good [late in life], because Dali's sight was no longer what it was and his hand was shaking, so those very fine paintings were impossible for him.

I worked for his dealers, so I used to have to go and get paintings out of him. There was always a lot of fluster. "Oh, I haven't finished. I've got all these great masterpieces." The fact was, in the last 20 years of his life, he was producing very little.

But Picasso was fond of him and was amused by him. Although they were so different, they were affectionate. Mutual respect.

» EXPRESS: What do are the most important revelations in your third volume?
» RICHARDSON:Everyone had swept the wife, Olga [Khokhlova], under the rug. Nobody has really gone into what she stood for and how important she was to Picasso. She was enormously important to him. When he married her, he was very much in love with her.

I think I'm the first person to record that a month before they were to be married, she had this terrible accident to her leg and she was on a stick at their marriage and this cast a huge shadow ahead on their lives. And she was rather neurotic and had all kinds of female health problems and was very jealous. The marriage disintegrated, particularly after 1927, when Picasso fell madly in love with this girl, Marie-Therese [Walter], who became his muse.

But I realized that you can only really understand the 1925-1935 period if you see this rather classic situation of this rich Parisian gentleman with a very bourgeois life — a butler in white gloves, a big car with a driver — on the one side, and on the other side, a completely bohemian life. He took a little apartment for [Marie] and created these wildly erotic paintings of her and had this sexual obsession with her. One counterbalances the other.

The later portraits of Olga are horrifying cruel, a lot of them, but they're very Picasso. They're strong, they're forceful and they're some of his most original works, whereas the ones of his mistress are more romantic.

» EXPRESS: Considering how important Marie-Therese was to Picasso, I was surprised there's only one photo of her in the book. Was it hard to find photos of her?
» RICHARDSON:No. There's one full-page classical drawing of her, looking exactly the way she looked. And there are endless images of her, paintings, but he didn't paint nearly as many classical representational images of Marie-Therese as he did of Olga. So, there are many images of [Marie], but she's completely unrecognizable.

There's a great one of her in the guise of his penis. I thought it was more important to put in these extraordinary metamorphic images of her than photographs.

I suppose I wanted to do more for Olga, because Olga was so unfamiliar to people. They had no idea how beautiful she was and what a tragic figure she was.

» EXPRESS: You've called Picasso a "shaman." What does that mean?
» RICHARDSON:Think of Picasso as a witch-doctor who makes his own fetishes — his masks, his instruments, whatever these magic things are. I think it's very interesting that Picasso sold virtually none of his sculpture. A witch-doctor does not sell his fetishes.

» EXPRESS: You write that Picasso had a "whorehouse addiction." Do you really mean that? And what effect did that have on his work?
» RICHARDSON:You have to take into consideration that Picasso was Andalusian — from the south of Spain. Andalusia had been under Moroccan occupation for many, many years. Life there was Arab in some ways. The women stayed in the kitchen and looked after the children. The men gathered in the cafe and discussed sex, politics and bull-fighting. Then they'd usually go to the whorehouse. Then they'd go home for dinner. It was very much a part of Spanish culture.

And the brothels in Paris in the '20 and '30s — it was like going to a cabaret. They had the most amazing rooms. I mean, if you enjoyed having sex in railroad trains, they had a railroad thing that wobbled, with somebody winding the scenery, so that you had the feeling that you were whizzing through the landscape.

It was a way of life. Picasso was more addicted to it than others, but brothels were very much a part of their culture. And his early work is full of images of whores and whorehouses.

» EXPRESS: Picasso painted in so many different styles that he's sometimes called a "chameleon." Do you agree?
» RICHARDSON:No. When he was young, he invented this new, modernist way of looking at things: cubism. But he was also a classicist. He was born on the shores of the Mediterranean and he was very conscious of classical culture — the Greeks and the Romans. These two separate things dominate Picasso's life. Cubism never really goes underground.

I think what one has to see in Picasso is what he said when he went to a bullfight and was doing cubist drawings as well as representational drawings. Picasso said, "Can't you see that they're exactly the same thing? I've drawn it in a different way, but I'm saying the same thing."

Years later, he said to me, "How boring it would be if everybody said the same thing, in the same tone of voice, all the time. It's in human nature to try and find different ways of saying the same thing."

» Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th St. NW; Mon., 6:30 p.m., $25; 202-639-1700. (Farragut West, Farragut North)

» Click here to read an excerpt from "A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932."

Written by Express contributor Tim Follos

Photo of Picasso in 1916 by Jean Cocteau/TWP Archives
Paintings: "Femme Assise Dans un Jardin" (1938); "Dora Maar with Cat" (1941); "Femme assise sur une Chaise" (1938)/TWP Archives