ARTnews confirmă că istoricul de artă John Richardson își încheie seria de volume despre biografia lui Picasso cu un al patrulea volum, programat să apară în 2014 la Knopf. În ultimii 50 de ani, John Richardson a scris sute de mii de cuvinte despre viața și arta lui Picasso. Biografia A life of Picasso este compusă din The Prodigy, 1881-1906 (1991), The Cubist Rebel, 1907-1916 (1996) și The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (2007). Ultimul volum va acoperi anii 1933-1973.

“I knew Picasso very well from 1951 to 1962 and saw him regularly. I last saw him in 1962 and told him I was going to do a book on his portraits, above all the women in his life. He was very cooperative and gave me a mass of information. With the help of Gijs, who has done books on Gaudí and Guernica, we have found important new material in the archives of the Spanish Foreign Ministry. Picasso didn’t go back to Spain after 1934, and his dream was to have a retrospective in Spain. In 1956, while he was perceived as the icon of anti-Fascism, he was considering an offer from Franco’s representative of a retrospective in Madrid. Picasso had agreed to do so, provided the project was kept secret. His friends were all Communist party members. Someone spilled the beans, and the project was abandoned.

Picasso was so thrilled by General Charles de Gaulle, whom he saw as the liberator of Paris in 1944, that he briefly became a Gaullist. Dora Maar, Picasso’s mistress at the time, told me that after dining with a group of Gaullists, he changed his mind and joined the Communist party a couple of days later. I suppose one of the things I would ask is, given the fact that the Communist party had failed him when the Soviets crushed the Hungarian revolution in 1956, why did he continue being a party member till the end of his life?

I’m still amazed that any human being can have so many characteristics that are the opposite of each other. The diversity: extreme loyalty, extreme disloyalty; extreme kindness, extreme cruelty; extreme generosity, extreme stinginess, but only when his family was concerned. He used money to control those closest to him. Many people who have such diversity of characteristics wind up in a loony bin. Picasso ended up a genius.” [John Richardson]

foto: detaliu din coperta volumului „Sacred monsters, sacred masters” de John Richardson.

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