A R T H I S T O R Y

Living it large A master biographer and his rakish progress

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JAMES FENTON A LIFE OF PICASSO Volume VI: The minotaur years 1933–1943

JOHN RICHARDSON With the collaboration of Ross Finocchio

and Delphine Huisinga

320pp. Cape. £35.

PICASSO Painting the Blue Period The Phillips Collection, Washington DC,

until June 12 PICASSO Painting the Blue Period KENNETH BRUMMEL AND SUSAN BEHRENDS FRANK, EDITORS 336pp. Distributed Art Publishers. £44.

ACERTAIN NOTORIETY, not to say a whiff of sulphur, hung about the late John Richardson. He liked to shock. But he only liked to shock if he himself was in perfect control of the timing and delivery of the shock. Then, he didn’t mince his words. One essay begins: “Most people who had dealings with Salvador Dalí’s Russian wife, Gala, would agree that to know her was to loathe her.” And he proceeds to make his case. Gala’s constant requirement, well into advanced old age, for sex with young men, led her to force her husband to churn out worthless works of art long after his trembling hand could no longer properly function.

But one often notices with Richardson that he is careful not to get trapped in his own hyperboles. If there is something good to be said about one of

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his subjects, he always seems happy to concede a point. “No doubt about it,” the same essay continues, “[Gala] was one of the nastiest wives a major modern artist ever saddled himself with.” The double concession is swiftly made: Dalí was, or had been, a major modern artist (for about ten years, Richardson thought), and his predicament in old age was partly his fault. He had “saddled himself ” with Gala. There was a price.

Well into his last years, Richardson was wonderful, wicked company. But he could be a fierce and unforgiving breaker-off of friendships, and he was prone to remember the slightest slight. Here he is, in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: A memoir of Picasso, Provence and Douglas Cooper (1999) on the subject of the publisher George Weidenfeld:

I have remained fond of George despite his occasional lapses of memory. For instance, in his memoir, Remembering My Good Friends, he describes me as “the son of a colonial official, educated at Westminster … [who] lived on his wits as a young man about town.” Whereas in fact my father was a soldier. I went to Stowe and the Slade School of Art and later earned my living first as an industrial designer, then as a journalist. How petty! one thinks. But Weidenfeld was not so vastly mistaken. In the same book Richardson himself tells us that his father was an army quartermaster-general in Africa, who went on to co-found the Army and Navy Store. The problem here is not the arcane question of how to refer to a quartermastergeneral (soldier or colonial official?). The unspoken offence is to refer to Richardson as one who “lived on his wits as a young man about town”. It sounds little short of libellous, as if Richardson were being remembered as a hustler. But that is precisely what many people thought he had been – a strikingly handsome and ambitious young man on the make.

And that, indeed, is the picture we receive from

TLS

“The Blue Room” by Pablo Picasso, 1901

“A problem for Richardson, as his biography swelled to a scale surely not foreseen, must have been the bet he was making with his mortality

James Fenton is the author of Leonardo’s Nephew: Essays on art and artists, 1998, and School of Genius: A history of the Royal Academy of Arts, 2006

an unexpected source, Angus Wilson’s novel, Hemlock and After (1952), in which the character of the stage designer Terence Lambert is based on Richardson. Terence is feeling washed up and desperate to make the connections he needs in order to advance his career, having “spivved along” as far as he can go. Of course, he says, “I can usually manage a tart’s holiday at Cannes or Ischia, but I’m twentyseven … and I must get settled”. He is prepared to enter an unsavoury relationship as a way of getting to know the right people.

The real John Richardson took up with Douglas Cooper, a wealthy collector of early Cubist paintings. Cooper was famously pugnacious. His ferocity as an interrogator of prisoners of war had proved useful to the Allies in North Africa until the point when one of the subjects of his torture broke down, spilled the beans and hanged himself, causing Cooper in turn (for he had formed an amour for the young man) to break down. No doubt Richardson was unaware of the full story when he allowed himself to be taken under Cooper’s wing, but, he tells us, it was he who put the details together in due course. And he lived with Cooper for a dozen years.

This sado-masochistic theme – the whiff of sulphur – stayed with Richardson’s reputation, by his design. His jokes on the subject were calculated to leave one uneasy. New York was a wonderful city, he said, because you can easily find a corpse at any time of the day or night. It was claimed that, in a moment of passion in a carriage in Central Park, New York, Richardson bit off his lover’s nose (they were splitting up). He would insist that, when staying at the Ritz in Madrid, one should demand a certain set of rooms where the traffic noise was loudest – handy, he said, for covering up the screams. On the walls of his drawing-room in Connecticut, he chose to display a series of Turkish prints “showing a variety of exotic tortures meted out to criminals in Constantinople”.

Richardson’s early ambition was to write about art, which he did in a professional but unremarkable way. His mentors in this effort were Cooper and T. C. Worsley, then assistant literary editor of the New Statesman. In due course, however, Worsley’s influence waned, and Richardson began to feel that he had absorbed everything that Cooper could teach him. Indeed, he became critical of Cooper’s judgements. Not only that. Richardson had begun research on a book about Picasso’s development through his portraits. But the more his research progressed the more he began to see that a book about Picasso’s portraits would not do. It would have to be about Picasso’s wives and mistresses through their portraits. And then he saw that portraits of wives would not do – he would need to write a full-length biography, with a full cast of characters, many of whom he already knew. At around this time – not coincidentally – he began to stage his difficult escape from Douglas Cooper.

One reason why the biography stretched to many volumes was that it needed to reflect Richardson’s fascination not only with the artist but with his circle of friends, wives and mistresses, and with the early dealers and collectors of his work. To me, Volume One will always be the part with the greatest allure, simply because the material is so seductive: the unfamiliar world of fin-de-siècle Barcelona with its attractive, homegrown version of Art Nouveau, the early struggles in Paris; Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein; the poor people of the streets, bars and cafes; the addicts and the suicides – the cast of the Blue Period.

The earliest printed use of the term “peinture bleue” (Blue Painting, rather than Period) comes from an article by Apollinaire published in 1905. The style, in which the colour blue stood for unrelieved melancholy, was at first unpopular with the dealers and the market. Not without reason. There are many remarkable works from the period, among them the portrait of the procuress, “La Celestina”, the hieratic “Woman with a Fan” and the print “The Frugal Repast”, which reprises a theme of hunger and alcoholism well established in French

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