A Life of Picasso: Vol. IV – a flawed but ‘astounding’ book
John Richardson’s new volume is clever and flamboyant

No novelist could have made Pablo Picasso up, said Laura Freeman in The Times. “The life is better than fiction.” And it’s a life that has a perfect chronicler, in the art historian John Richardson.
The first three volumes of Richardson’s “monumental biography”, covered Picasso’s life till the age of 50. Richardson wasn’t even midway through the fourth when he died, aged 95, in 2019. And so this final instalment breaks off in 1943, with Picasso aged 61 – and destined to “live, paint and love for another 30 years”. Despite being written in testing circumstances – Richardson’s eyesight was failing – there isn’t the slightest “let-up” in quality. This volume is as “clever, amusing, flamboyant” as ever.
“The years under consideration are some of the most tumultuous in Picasso’s long and twisty life,” said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. As ever, his love life was complex, his treatment of women “unforgivably callous”. Extricating himself from his “ugly marriage” to the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, he took up with the surrealist photographer Dora Maar – while regularly visiting an older flame, the “voluptuous” model Marie-Thérèse Walter.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
This volume also sees the emergence of “Picasso the political artist”. He was prompted to engage with politics by the Spanish Civil War: Guernica, his 1937 masterpiece, was a response to the Nazis’ “brutal annihilation” of the Basque town. After the War broke out, Picasso made the “extraordinary decision” to stay in Paris, although an outspoken anti-fascist. The only pity is that this project ends suddenly in 1943. This biography is a “masterpiece”, albeit an “incomplete” one.
Written in a style “at once magisterial and indiscreet”, it makes for “compulsive reading”, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. And yet in many ways it feels strikingly “out of step”, because the cultural landscape has changed so much since the previous instalments appeared.
Richardson “seems happy to repeat others’ misogyny”: thus Olga (he refers to women by their first names) is a “termagant” and a “madwoman”, while Marie-Thérèse is “immature” and “ordinary” – “except in bed”. And Richardson’s strenuously biographical approach to Picasso the artist – with his lovers inspiring his various “periods” – is one younger scholars have largely “moved away from”.
Flawed though it may be, this book is still “astounding”, said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. With his earlier volumes, Richardson “set the standard for modern artists’ biographies”. This is a “worthy” sign-off.
Jonathan Cape 368pp £35; The Week Bookshop £27.99 (incl. p&p)
The Week Bookshop
To order this title or any other book in print, visit theweekbookshop.co.uk, or speak to a bookseller on 020-3176 3835. Opening times: Monday to Saturday 9am-5.30pm and Sunday 10am-4pm.
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
Book reviews: 'Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference' and 'Is a River Alive?'
Feature A rallying cry for 'moral ambition' and the interwoven relationship between humans and rivers
-
'King of the Hill' actor shot dead outside home
speed read Jonathan Joss was fatally shot by a neighbor who was 'yelling violent homophobic slurs,' says his husband
-
DOJ, Boulder police outline attacker's confession
speed read Mohamed Sabry Soliman planned the attack for a year and 'wanted them all to die'
-
Book reviews: 'Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference' and 'Is a River Alive?'
Feature A rallying cry for 'moral ambition' and the interwoven relationship between humans and rivers
-
A city of culture in the high Andes
The Week Recommends Cuenca is a must-visit for those keen to see the 'real Ecuador'
-
Green goddess salad recipe
The Week Recommends Avocado can be the creamy star of the show in this fresh, sharp salad
-
Ancient India: living traditions – 'ethereal and sensual' exhibition
The Week Recommends Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism are explored in show that remains 'remarkably compact'
-
6 well-preserved homes built in the 1930s
Feature Featuring a restored 1934 colonial in Arizona and a cold-storage warehouse turned loft in New York City
-
Things in Nature Merely Grow: memoir of 'harsh beauty' after loss
The Week Recommends Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li's 'devastating' memoir explores the deaths of her two sons
-
Sirens: entertaining satire on the lives of the ultra-wealthy stars Julianne Moore
The Week Recommends This 'blackly comic affair' unfurls at a 'breakneck speed'
-
Mrs Warren's Profession: 'tour-de-force' from Imelda Staunton and daughter Bessie Carter
The Week Recommends Mother-daughter duo bring new life to George Bernard Shaw's morality play