A Life of Picasso IV: The Minotaur Years 1933-1943

In the immeasurably rich A Life of Picasso IV: The Minotaur Years 1933-1943, John Richardson resumes the artist's story like so: "Of all the problems besetting Picasso in late 1932, foremost was the misery of married life with his Russian wife, Olga." The romantically tempestuous decade that Richardson proceeds to cover, which largely corresponds with Picasso's 50s, finds the painter almost unreasonably productive, as if he discovered artistic fortification in unrelenting domestic chaos.

Richardson interweaves the dramas of Picasso's personal life in France (his efforts to divorce Olga, his rotating mistresses, his troubled teenage son) with reports on his artistic output (most famously 1937's Guernica) and updates on his public persona (he sticks to the periphery of the surrealist movement but stands proud as part of the Resistance). If Richardson seems to be able to understand his subject so well, that's probably because the author was an acquaintance of Picasso, as he makes unostentatiously plain throughout the book ("I was present in the 1950s when Picasso revealed the depth of his van Gogh obsession").

Richardson, who died in 2019 at age 95, didn't live to complete Picasso's story, but A Life of Picasso IV, whose illustrations number nearly as many as there are pages in the main text, concludes with a fitting epitaph for the artist, courtesy of his mistress-muse Dora Maar. "It's no wonder Dora turned to religion," Richardson writes of her life after the artist replaced her. "As she would later say, 'After Picasso, there is only God.' " --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

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