A Life of Picasso Volume IV

The Minotaur Years: 1933-1943

A Life of Picasso Volume IV
John Richardson
RRP:
NZ$ 85.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 68.00
Hardback
h238 x 187mm - 368pg
7 Apr 2022 UK
International import eta 7-19 days
9780224031226
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The beautifully illustrated fourth volume of Picasso' s life - set in France and Spain during the Spanish Civil War and World War II - covers friendships with the surrealist painters; artistic inspiration around Guernica and the Minotaur; his muses Marie-Ther se, Dora Maar and Fran oise Gilot; and much more. The beautifully illustrated, long-awaited final volume of John Richardson' s magisterial Life of Picasso, drawing on original research from interviews and never-before-seen material in the Picasso family archives. The Minotaur Years opens in 1933 with a visit by the Hungarian-French photographer Brassai to Picasso' s chateau in Normandy, Boisgeloup, where he would take his iconic photographs of the celebrated plaster busts of Picasso' s lover Marie-Ther se Walter. Picasso was contributing to Andre Breton' s Minotaur magazine and spending time with the likes of Man Ray, Salvador Dali, Lee Miller, and the poet Paul luard, in Paris and the south of France. It was during this time that Picasso began writing surrealist poetry and became obsessed with the image of himself as the mythic Minotaur. Richardson shows us the artist being as prolific as ever, painting Walter, as well as the surrealist photographer Dora Maar, who became a muse, collaborator and lover. The bombing of Guernica in April 1937 would inspire Picasso' s vast masterwork of the same name, which he painted in just a few weeks for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World' s Fair. When the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, Picasso chose to remain in the city despite the threat that his art would be confiscated. In 1943, Picasso met Fran oise Gilot who would replace Marr and inspire a brilliant new sequence of paintings. As always, Richardson tells Picasso' s story through his work, analysing how it shows what the artist was feeling and thinking. His fascinating and illuminating narrative immerses us in one of the most exciting moments in twentieth-century cultural history, and brings to a close the definitive and critically acclaimed biography of one of the world' s most celebrated artists.
The final chapter of a magisterial biography. . . The author' s unique, extensive knowledge and insider information about Picasso - both the man and artist - informs insightful explications of the nuances and symbolism in Picasso' s works. . . A masterful accomplishment. * Kirkus Reviews * This first volume of an amazing life is the finest biography of an artist I have read. . . the ultimate and irreplaceable biography, the biography which proves that Picasso' s famous luck has held out. -- Waldemar Januszczak * Guardian - Praise for ' Volume I' * Magnificent. . . Richardson' s book is intellectually thrilling and visually dazzling. . . an indispensable study of the unnatural, blasphemous, sometimes obscene and mostly glorious madness known as art. -- Peter Conrad * Observer - Praise for ' Volume I' * 1907 is one of the great watershed dates in the history of modern art and modernism, seeing as it did the painting of Picasso' s huge and stylised brothel scene, Les Demoiselles d' Avignon. . . Richardson covers these momentous ten years from 1907 to the end of the First World with great elegance and quiet authority. All the familiar figures of modernism pass by: Gertrude Stein, Apollinaire, Matisse, Derain, Satie, Cocteau, Diaghilev et al. We move effortlessly from scholarly art history through Picasso' s turbulent relationships with his friends, dealers, mistresses to, for example, a perfect distillation of the differences in ambience between Montparnasse and Montmartre. What makes the two published volumes so outstanding is the sense of Picasso the man emerging - in all his complexity - alongside the superb analysis of Picasso the artist. -- William Boyd * Spectator - Praise for ' Volume II' * Magisterial. . . Richardson' s ambitious project dwarfs all previous biographies of Picasso. . . [He] has a gift for telling pen-portraits and makes vivid an entire gallery of pioneering dealers and early collectors. -- Frances Spalding * Sunday Times - Praise for ' Volume II' *
John Richardson was born in London in 1924. He studied art at the Slade School but soon gave up painting for art criticism. In 1949 he moved to France, where befriended Picasso, Braque, Leger, and Cocteau. The first volume of his magisterial four-volume A Life of Picasso won the Whitbread Prize in 1991. He was also the author of the memoir, The Sorcerer' s Apprentice; an essay collection, Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters; and books on Manet and Braque. He wrote for the New York Review of Books, New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He was made a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 1993, and served as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University from 1995 to 1996. He died in 2019.

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