Pablo Picasso with his friend the art historian and Picasso's biographer John Richardson ( he died this year on March , he was 95 )
Photo taken by Dora Maar
Ron Yrabedra there is a new exhibit opening at Gagosian Gallery.... "Picasso's Women" ...in honor of John Richardson.
John Richardson, 1998
Art critic John Richardson dies aged 95
The eminent British art historian died in his Manhattan home, with the fourth volume of his definitive Picasso biography as yet unpublished
Sir John Richardson, the eminent British art historian and critic whose multivolume series on Pablo Picasso drew upon his personal and aesthetic affinity for the Spanish artist, and was widely praised as a work of art in its own right, has died aged 95.
Nicholas Latimer, a vice president at publishers Alfred A Knopf, said Richardson died on Tuesday morning in his Manhattan home.
Richardson’s first Picasso book, A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy 1881-1906, was published in 1991, and was followed by editions covering 1907-1916 and 1917-1932. A fourth and final volume had been in the works for several years but a date for its publication has not been set.
Like Leon Edel’s five-volume epic on Henry James and Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, Richardson’s Picasso books were regarded as biographies of the highest literary quality, graced by knowledge, poetry, passion and insight. Richardson’s criticism and scholarship brought him a Whitbread award in 1991, election to the British Academy two years later, and a knighthood in 2012.
Reviewing Richardson’s third Picasso volume in 2007, the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani cited Richardson’s “intimate understanding of the artist’s temperament and endlessly inventive styles, his expansive vocabulary of myths and motifs and, most important, the mysterious nature of the alchemy by which he transformed his own experiences and emotions into art.”
Richardson had admired Picasso’s work since he was a teenager, when he failed to convince his mother to lend him $250 (£190) so he could buy Minotauromachy (a black and white print that later sold for $1.5m (£1.1m)). He befriended the artist in the late 1940s, while both were living in the south of France, and remained close to him for years.
“It must have been hell to be his child or his mistress but to his friends he was beguiling. There was never a dull moment,” Richardson told the Associated Press in 1991, adding that Picasso seemed inspired by his friends.
“He was like a human cannibal in that way. We’d all be suffering from nervous exhaustion at the end of the day from his intensity and he would have all this energy he seemed to get from us. At the age of 85, he’d go sailing off into studio and work all night long.”
Patrician in his speech and attire, Richardson had lived in New York since 1960 and his 5,000 sq ft loft on Fifth Avenue included art by Andy Warhol, Georges Braques and, of course, Picasso, who died in 1973. Among his friends were Warhol, music executive Ahmet Ertegun, Oscar and Annette de la Renta and art dealer Larry Gagosian, at whose galleries Richard helped curate several Picasso exhibitions.
Richardson also wrote for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, and was a board member of the Modern Library, a Penguin Random House imprint that reissues classic works. He served as managing director of the art dealers’ consortium Artemis, founded Christie’s USA and headed the New York-based auction house for nine years.
Born in London in 1924, Richardson was the son of Boer war commander and Army & Navy Stores co-founder Sir Wodehouse Richardson. His “earliest, indeed happiest memories” were of his father’s business, including a Victoria Street department store where employees treated him as a “little prince” and hung his picture in the elevator.
But when he was five, his father died and his mother sent him to a boarding school so “horrendous” that Richardson once “was left dangling by the wrists from a hook in the ceiling, my shrieks disregarded by those in authority”. Mercifully, by age 13 he was attending the more humane Stowe public school, which featured a progressive art program that Richardson credited with “triggering an obsession with Picasso”.
As a teenager he decided to become an artist – a dream he would abandon in his 20s, but not before he had befriended Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, among others, and helped design the Britain Can Make It exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
For much of the 1950s, he lived in a chateau in France with the art collector Douglas Cooper, who died in 1984. In The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, published in 1999, Richardson remembered Cooper as an adventurous and charismatic mentor, but also spiteful and easily offended. Their relationship was damaged for good after Richardson questioned the authenticity of two paintings allegedly by the French artist Fernand Léger.
“There was a terrible silence, during which Douglas’s pink face turned the colour of a summer pudding. ‘What a little expert we’ve become,’” Richardson wrote. “And then came a shriek like calico ripping – comical but also alarming. ‘How dare you pontificate to me about Léger!’ he yelled. ‘Those paintings are absolutely authentic. Get out, get out.’ And then he took another look at the photographs, and I realised that he realised that I was right and he was wrong. Things would never be the same again.”
John Richardson ( A Life of Picasso ) Volume 1 ( 1881-1906 ) volume 2 ( 1907- 1916 )
Volume 3 ( 1917-1932 )
Volume 3 ( 1917-1932 )
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90年代初，我的"課外"讀物以Henri Matisse的為主，當然讀過 Matisse and Picasso by Françoise Gilot.
A Life of Picasso 1881-1906 (Vol 1). John Richardson 在1991年香港開會時買的。這本書的11頁introduction，在2017年10月下旬才讀完。
據 A Life of Picasso 1881-1906 (Vol 1) By John Richardson 的introduction，晚年"國王"Picasso 又"回到"他的巴塞隆納、"西班牙圈"：90歲作：
Communion, first (Holy) ：初領聖體；開聖體：指教友初次領聖體。歐美習慣，幼童初領聖體，禮儀十分隆重，父母並為之舉行慶祝。
Picasso 油畫，巴塞隆納，1896(16歲 )
altar boys ：輔祭童；輔祭者：舉行彌撒時的輔助者。昔日多由男孩（或成年人）擔任，今日女性也能輔祭。又稱 server 。
Picasso 作。1896，巴塞隆納
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Richardson_(art_historian)
A Life of Picasso (1991 - ):
- The Prodigy, 1881-1906 (Vol 1). Random House, New York 1991, ISBN 978-0-375-71149-7 (German edition: Kindler, München, 1991)
- The Cubist Rebel, 1907-1916 (Vol 2). Random House, New York 1996, ISBN 978-0-375-71150-3 (German edition: Kindler, 1997)
- The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Vol 3). Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-307-26665-1
Sir John Patrick Richardson, KBE, FBA (born 6 February 1924) is a British art historian and Picasso biographer. Richardson has also worked as an industrial designer and as a reviewer for The New Observer. In 1952, he moved to Provence, where he became friends with Picasso, Léger and de Staël. In 1960, he moved to New York and organized a nine-gallery Picasso retrospective. Christie's then appointed him to open their US office, which he ran for the next nine years. In 1973 he joined New York gallery M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., as vice president in charge of 19th- and 20th-century painting, and later became managing director of Artemis, a mutual fund specializing in works of art.
In 1980 he started devoting all his time to writing and working on his Picasso biography. He has also been a contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. In 1993 Richardson was elected to the British Academy and in 1995 he was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford. In 2011, Richardson was awarded France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and in 2012 was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
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