Richardson on Picasso: Part III

Let's look briefly at a few other dimensions of the new third volume of John Richardson's ongoing biography of Picasso:

I think it's a safe bet that Richardson will be the last of the line of Picasso biographers who knew him personally, a line that includes Roland Penrose, Pierre Daix and even Francoise Gilot, Picasso's companion from 1944 to 1953, who wrote a best selling memoir. Richardson first met Picasso in 1953, when the artist was 72 and Richardson was living with the British collector and critic Douglas Cooper not far from Picasso in the south of France. He was in periodic contact with him until Picasso's death in 1973 and afterwards remained friends with Picasso's widow Jacqueline. Even in the first three volumes of his biography, which cover a period of Picasso's life before they met, Richardson writes about Picasso with the sweep and confidence that come from personal acquaintance.

No surprise — Richardson is constantly illuminating on the sources of Picasso's art. He may not solve the mystery of why Picasso was compelled in these years to shuttle among styles, but Richardson knows where to look for the sources of inspiration. Though Picasso continued all his life to deploy the Cubist language he had developed with Braque, his neo-classical phase in the 1920s puzzled a lot of his admirers. Richardson sees Picasso's encounter with the Farnese marbles in Naples as a crucial moment in that move, more important that Picasso's study of classical sculptures at the Louvre.

The giganticism of the Farnese Hercules, and the disproportions of his limbs....

Farnese Hercules, Roman copy of 4th century B.C. Greek original — Museo Archeoligico Nazionale, Naples

....would plainly work their way into Picasso's art years later.

Large Bather, Picasso, 1921 — Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris

Richardson also points to the 16th-century Mannerist sculpture by Jean Goujon and his workshop that Picasso encountered in Fontainebleau when he was spending a crucial summer there in 1921. Again, massive, disproportionate limbs and figures squeezed into confining spaces. Picasso was looking for a classicism with coiled energies, and he found it in those places.

Jean Cocteau, 1930 — Photo: George Hoyningen-Huene

Lastly, the strange case of Jean Cocteau. For most of this volume Richardson is much more negative towards Cocteau than he was in the Introduction to Volume I. In the new volume he treats Cocteau as vain, shallow, scheming and dilettantish, all of which he was, but also genuinely gifted. I like Truman Capote's catty five word judgment of Cocteau, delivered in the early 1950s: "vastly imaginative but vivaciously insincere."

And it was after all Cocteau who gave Picasso the crucial commission to work on his ballet Parade, an opportunity that enormously furthered Picasso's career and circle of contacts. Richardson uses the words gimmick or gimmicky no less than five times to describe the real world sound effects Cocteau wanted to add to Erik Satie's score for Parade, though it has always seemed to me that they would have predicted the noises-as-music in John Cage and even the Beatles. (Some "real" sounds, like the tapping of typewriter keys, survived in the score that was performed.) For anyone sufficiently interested in Cocteau, Francis Steegmuller's 1970 biography takes a more balanced view, still very skeptical towards Cocteau — it seems to be the only safe position to take on him — but more comprehensive in his acknowledgment of the man's gifts.

I caught up with Richardson by phone last week. I'll start posting that conversation tomorrow.