Georges Braque once described his artistic collaboration with Pablo Picasso as: “like mountain-climbers roped together.” The image is striking, not only because it gracefully evokes the excitement of inventing Cubism, a revolution in art and philosophy, but also because it places companionship at the heart of that discovery. We usually think of Picasso not as a collaborator, but as someone who scaled the heights of genius and fame alone, from his prodigious childhood to his much-photographed old age. In 1939, Time suggested his name was synonymous with the idea of modern art, and 80 years on the observation is no less true. Picasso’s genius spawned a dizzying industry and much personal mayhem. The people who knew him, worked for him or slept with him often gave their lives over to him too. Many of them wrote fawning or furious memoirs. Several killed themselves. His granddaughter Marina said it took 15 years of therapy to get over being related to him.
The British art historian John Richardson got to know Picasso in the early 1950s, when he and his partner, the art collector Douglas Cooper, lived nearby in the south of France. Cooper had a collection of Cubist art and Picasso often visited to look at it, or invited the men for lunch and to tour his studio. Sometimes he brought them a piece he’d been working on as a present—a drawing, ceramic or print. A token gift from Picasso could change your life.
The artist was encouraging when Richardson proposed a book analysing Picasso’s creative process through his portraits of women. In the end, though, Richardson decided on a fuller biography, “one that would set the artist’s life and work in relation to each other and in the broader context of cultural history.” The first volume of A Life of Picasso came out in 1991, with three further volumes following at increasingly lengthy intervals, the last of which is now published posthumously. Richardson died in 2019 before he could finish his monumental project.
Volume IV, The Minotaur Years, stretches from 1933 to 1943, taking Picasso up to the age of 61 (he died 30 years later, in 1973). It was written with the help of two collaborators when Richardson was in his eighties and nineties and losing his sight. Unfortunately, those pressures show. In earlier volumes, Richardson comes across as a lucid but sceptical admirer, confidently debunking the myths that have been so attractive to other biographers. By contrast, The Minotaur Years, while covering one of Picasso’s most productive decades and offering valuable observations, sometimes feels slapdash. Casual sexism makes parts of it hard to read without harrumphing. Previously Richardson has described what it was like to spend a day with Picasso: “you suffered from total nervous exhaustion. You felt that he had taken every last atom of feeling out of you, and then he would go off in his studio at midnight and work all night at the age of 80 on your energy and love.” Here there are few such insights and the anecdotes seem insubstantial or gossipy. For example, Richardson learns from someone who used to be Picasso’s gardener that the artist “loved vegetables, especially peas, potatoes and carrots if they were picked very young.” So now you know.
During the decade covered by this volume, Picasso was living in Paris and trying to extract himself from a marriage to Olga Khokhlova, whom he had met while she was a dancer with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. He was also pursuing relationships with other women, notably Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was 17 years old when he met her outside the Galeries Lafayette (he told her, “you and I are going to do great things together”) and Dora Maar, a photographer and artist. Maar would go on to document the painting of his masterwork, Guernica (1937), made in response to the bombing of that small Basque town at the start of the Spanish Civil War, and she remained in Paris with him during the German occupation. Countless canvases produced during this time were inspired by Picasso’s relationship with these three women, who knew about their rivals and were often humiliated or tormented by their situation. “My fits of jealousy drive me crazy and stupid with pain,” Maar wrote to him. Surrealist groups forming in Paris in the 1930s were also vying for Picasso’s love. He resisted their claims, although he did take credit for coining the word “surrealism,” which for him had nothing to do with the unconscious but meant “more real than the real.” The artist also wrote surrealist poetry in Spanish and French, some of which is quoted here, and is uncritically compared to James Joyce:
so moving the memory of the broken glass in his eye does not strike the hour on the bell that scents the blue so tired of loving the sighing garment that covers him the sun that may from one moment to the next explode in his hand
During this period Picasso, along with other artists, was attracted to the mythological figure of the minotaur, which has the head of a bull and the body of a man. Freud had identified the creature as representing irrational impulses, making it the perfect surrealist mascot. Picasso provided an image of the beast for the first copy of a new journal, Minotaure, which would feature articles by Jacques Lacan and Salvador Dalí and part of a score by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. In his own work, the minotaur became the artist’s proxy, representing both his Spanish heritage and his bullish personality. Perhaps he admired the power of the animal, too. Richardson believes that Picasso’s diminutive stature prompted an interest in size. “Heads out of all proportion to bodies, and features out of all proportion to faces, are only some of the devices that Picasso will use to conjure up monumentality.”
In drawings and paintings reproduced in the book, we see the Picasso/minotaur figure gazing at the body of his lover, Marie-Thérèse, or locked in a tussle with Olga, who is portrayed as a frightened or even deranged horse—sometimes merely a lashing tongue between crumbling teeth. In his corrida—or bullfight—images, Picasso plays the bull to Olga’s horse with Marie-Thérèse watching from the stands, serene as a Grecian vase. It was at a bullfight with picadors riding on horses that Picasso told Richardson, “those horses are the women in my life.” He lamented, apparently, the introduction in 1930 of padded coats designed to give the horses more protection from a goring.
The sexual parallels—and the cruelty—are obvious. Picasso would always rather adore or revile a woman than have a steady relationship with one. Steadiness doesn’t make for great art. For that reason, it’s disingenuous to ask why Picasso was cruel. He wasn’t the first artist to discover how useful it is, when you need material, to yearn for an unavailable lover, to provoke hatred and jealousy in your partner, to court madness.
The role of muse has its attractions—after all, who wouldn’t want to be the subject of a legendary artwork? More mysterious are the artist’s domestic arrangements. What’s it like to live with someone who turns you into a useful character for their work? To be lampooned in art by your husband, while his mistress is tenderly evoked in erotica? Dora Maar (Picasso’s companion from 1936 to 1945) once told Richardson that when the woman in Picasso’s life changed, virtually everything else changed too. “And, sure enough,” he writes in Volume I, “over the next six months I was able to observe how the arrival of a new mistress triggered a new style. Soon there was also a new house, a new poet, a new group of friends (who provided the admiration, understanding and love that were as vital as his daily bread), a new dog, new servants and, not least, new kinds of food.”
Novelty provided lifeblood. As with the picked carrots, Picasso liked fresh, young women, which may explain why his subject matter seemed not to evolve all that much. He had been putting vaginas in funny places since his early twenties and would still be making erotica in the last years of his life. Bulls and bullfighters, women with oddly arranged breasts, were staples of his art. The Picassian bull and the hysterical horse figure both turn up in Guernica along with a serene Marie-Thérèse. The familiarity of these figures shows how Picasso approached larger questions through his personal fixations—with varying degrees of success. For many people, Guernica is an extraordinary painting that nonetheless fails to evoke the horror of war. Filmmaker Luis Buñuel said “everything about it makes me uncomfortable—the grandiloquent technique as well as the way it politicises art.” When the painting arrived in Britain, Anthony Blunt described it as “not an act of public mourning but the expression of a private brainstorm.” Nevertheless, thousands of people saw the painting when it was exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London’s east end, with visitors asked to contribute pairs of boots for the Republican war effort in Spain in lieu of an admission ticket.
Picasso’s paintings of women are often a kind of self-portrait too which is why, says critic John Berger in Success and Failure of Picasso, the many portraits of Marie-Thérèse made in the 1930s are among his most accomplished works. “He is single-minded about her, and can see her as the most direct manifestation of his own feelings. He paints her like a Venus, but a Venus such as nobody else has ever painted.”
On canvas Picasso contorted his young lover’s body into voluptuous shapes that capture both her sexuality and his sexual response. Part of her face or arm becomes a penis. In Nude Woman Lying in the Sun on the Beach (1932), she’s reduced to a series of geometric shapes and a few tiny circles. Nipples perhaps? A navel? To the untutored eye, there’s nothing here to cause alarm, yet Picasso’s art dealer Paul Rosenberg spied something unacceptable. “No, I refuse to show arseholes in my gallery.”
Plenty of other people were willing to indulge an arsehole, though. Photographs taken in the south of France or at Picasso’s country house in Normandy, Boisgeloup, show glamorous house parties involving admirers like the poet Paul Éluard and British historian Roland Penrose. Late lunches were followed by bed-hopping siestas, says Richardson; Éluard even offered the maestro his wife. “As was his way with his women, Éluard had made her available to Picasso, but the artist had turned him down.”
His women. It’s a phrase that pops up regularly. Richardson tends to assign the women in Picasso’s life one of two roles: captivating new love interest or tiresome “termagant.” Dora Maar, when Picasso first meets her, is “immensely ambitious,” setting her sights on the artist. Marie-Thérèse is ordinary, “except in bed,” says Richardson, without providing any evidence either for the exception or the rule. Olga becomes “boring” and “hectoring,” at a time when she is struggling to look after their troubled child, Paulo. If only we could hear about these women from their own friends, and not only through the eyes of Picasso’s male acolytes—perhaps they lost their friends when they took up with him. All the women in this book seem one-dimensional, which is ironic, considering how many dimensions Picasso found for them on the canvas.
Too often reminiscences are treated as gospel, so there’s no challenge, for example, to the opinion that Olga’s “oppressive mothering” is responsible for Paulo’s poor mental health. Rather the author seems slyly to take the side of Picasso and his cronies, noting how Penrose “replaced his tiresome French wife” and Man Ray bagged himself a “gorgeous girlfriend from Guadeloupe.”
Writing about the same period in 1991, Richardson seemed both more sympathetic towards these women and more critical of their treatment: “in image after image, the misogynistic pasha would endlessly reduce his teenage mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, to a thing of flesh and orifices in works of orgasmic explosiveness. Again at the end of his life, when the sexual act and creative act became metaphors for each other, the work gapes with vaginas, which the artist’s loaded brush—his surrogate penis—would remorselessly probe.”
If Picasso’s wife and lovers are dismissed in Volume IV, another female finally gets her due: Conchita, his little sister, who died in 1895 at the age of seven when the family was living in La Coruña, northern Spain. Many of the anecdotes about Picasso’s childhood, says Richardson, were embroidered or invented. However, he believes it is true that aged 13, Picasso vowed never to paint again if Conchita survived a bout of diphtheria; the young artist gave into temptation though, picked up a paintbrush and his sister died. That broken vow, Richardson contends, fuelled Picasso’s life-long superstition and dread of illness or death. It explains the appearance of Conchita, sometimes holding a light, sometimes mingled with the figure of Marie-Thérèse, in numerous studies Richardson describes as “votive” works. In this final volume he also identifies Conchita—imagined as an adult—as the woman holding a lamp in Guernica.
Richardson was only 24 when he first met Picasso, and his life was intertwined with the artist’s until its very end. His collaborators have described how they rushed revisions to his hospital bed for approval. “We felt that as long as he was working, he was going to stay alive,” said Delphine Huisinga. Richardson sometimes wistfully wondered if he could keep going to 100 and bring out Volume V.
“It’s no good writing about Picasso if you don’t take in the paradox of his character,” Richardson once said in an interview. Nobody has brought us closer to understanding this extraordinary and complex artist. From the final volume Picasso emerges as a giant of the 20th century, but also, somehow, as a smaller man.
