A Life of Picasso Volume IV: The Minotaur Years: 1933-1943 - Life of Picasso (Hardback)
John Richardson (author)- 5+ in stock
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The fourth volume in Richardson’s definitive biography charts the period during which Picasso was contributing to André Breton's Minotaur magazine, mingling with the likes of Salvador Dali and Lee Miller and producing one of his most famed works, Guernica.
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 Brassaï to Picasso's chateau in Normandy, Boisgeloup, where he would take his iconic photographs of the celebrated plaster busts of Picasso's lover Marie-Thérèse Walter. Picasso was contributing to André Breton's Minotaur magazine and spending time with the likes of Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Lee Miller, and the poet Paul Éluard, 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 Françoise 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.
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9780224031226
Number of pages: 320
Weight: 1121 g
Dimensions: 240 x 190 x 31 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'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
'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
'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
'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
'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
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