John Richardson embraced life with uncommon grace, wit, and intelligence. Even in his late eighties and early nineties, with his eyesight almost entirely gone, his avidity for new people, ideas, and adventures remained strong. When he died he was a youthful ninety-five. To the end he had the same striking head—the commanding brow, the aquiline profile, the serious, searching eyes—that you see in photographs taken more than half a century earlier. He remained in many respects the avid explorer of life’s highways and byways we encounter in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the memoir of his adventures as a young man in the decades after World War II. The monumental biography of Picasso to which he dedicated so much of his life had its origins in those early years, when he lived with Douglas Cooper, a distinguished collector and connoisseur of cubism, and through Cooper got to know Picasso.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice can be read as a coming-of-age story but also as a work of social history. Richardson, whose dash and charm were spiced with a certain diffidence, is always eager to turn a reader’s attention from his own younger self to the men and women he was getting to know. The book, which is subtitled “A Memoir of Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper,” focuses on Cooper, who was both mentor and lover and who by the end of the story seems to be playing a sort of erudite Falstaff to Richardson’s Prince Hal. Along the way we are given enough of a glimpse of Richardson’s family and childhood to see where the intrepid grown-up came from. His father, decorated by Queen Victoria and knighted by Edward VII, was one of the founders of the extraordinarily successful Army and Navy London department stores. His mother, whom his father, then in his seventies, met when she was in her thirties and working in the store, came from a family that included, as Richardson tells us, a lady’s maid, gamekeepers, and butlers. Richardson comments that this “upstairs-downstairs background has proved, if anything, an advantage. I like to think it has enabled me to see things simultaneously from very different angles, like a cubist painter, and arrive at sharper, more ironical perceptions.”
That “upstairs-downstairs” observation is essential to understanding John Richardson, who toward the end of his life cheerfully admitted to being “a bit of a jumble myself.” He easily found a place in the tumultuous high bohemian world that Proust had begun chronicling well before he was born. For Richardson—who as a young man was friends with Jean Cocteau, who in his youth had known Proust—it was a privilege to live at a time when the definitions of who was privileged and what constituted privilege were changing. In The Sorcerer’s Apprentice he opens a window onto a new, postwar aristocracy—what might be called a democratic aristocracy. While the old titles and prerogatives weren’t entirely gone, there was a reenergized celebration of geographic and economic mobility, creative and imaginative prowess, and sexual freedom. If Richardson hadn’t known so many of the dramatis personae, he wouldn’t have been able to write with such perception about the situation of the modern artist, who can be both buoyed up and brought low by the passing parade. Picasso, as seen in Richardson’s panoramic biography, is constantly reimagining the modern world’s upstairs-downstairs jumble, discovering fresh pictorial possibilities as the decades pass and friends and lovers come and go.
Beginning in the 1950s, Richardson witnessed this process firsthand. Picasso, his family, and his entourage became visitors at the Château de Castille, the splendidly colonnaded neoclassical wreck that he and Cooper turned into a striking setting for the cubist masterworks Cooper collected. Richardson became part of Picasso’s circle. He was there to witness Picasso’s deepening relationship with Jacqueline Roque, who became the artist’s second wife; his revived friendship with Cocteau, whom he’d first known around the time of World War I; his fascination with the bullfights in Arles and Nîmes and his convivial interactions with some of the famous matadors. Richardson was able to watch as Picasso moved from the relaxed bucolic mood of much of the work he did in the 1950s to the darkening horizons of his late prints and paintings. As Richardson reflected on his encounters with Picasso, he began to contemplate a biography that would navigate all the perilous twists and turns of Picasso’s art and life. He developed a sixth sense for the workings of the artist’s imagination. Decades later, as he began to write about Picasso’s early years, he was able to bring a sense of immediacy and spontaneity to his accounts of fin-de-siècle Barcelona and of Paris before World War I.
There’s an ease and lucidity about Richardson’s prose that some of us Americans are inclined enviously to imagine is an Englishman’s birthright. When I told John that the conversational tone of his writing left me imagining that he wrote very quickly, he responded with a sigh that each sentence had to be written and rewritten, time and again. I believe it. Richardson keeps the saga moving without ever turning Picasso’s magnificently labyrinthine life into a well-oiled machine. It is one of the rare biographies of a visual artist that has literary power. I’m not the first person to observe that Richardson’s Picasso bears comparison with Leon Edel’s Henry James and Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce.
Richardson, who moved with confidence in fashionable circles and was friends with some of the elegant women whom Truman Capote dubbed his swans, was temperamentally steady and clearheaded, apparently able to embrace the good in friends, lovers, and colleagues and set the rest aside. I knew him only slightly, but my sense was that his sharp, flexible mind made it possible to embrace the pleasures of café society without losing track of what was going on in the rest of world. The loft on lower Fifth Avenue, which was his New York home for the last twenty years of his life and a sort of fantasia on neoclassical and rococo themes, could on first glance look like the work of a top-notch interior decorator, but a closer examination revealed refinements and even astonishments that reflected his restless thought and eagle eye. In his years in New York, where he moved in the 1960s, he opened an American office for Christie’s, the auction house, handled nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings at the Knoedler Galleries, and was involved with the art investment outfit Artemis. But when he wrote an essay for The New York Review of Books or turned to his lifework, the biography of Picasso, he was a man unburdened by the commercial calculations that must preoccupy anybody involved with the buying and selling of works of art.
The finest nonfiction reflects not only the author’s deep knowledge of a subject but also, and sometimes perhaps equally, the author’s sense of the significance of that subject for contemporary readers. To grasp Richardson’s contribution to our understanding of Picasso we need to go back to the 1950s, when he and Cooper were visiting the artist in Provence. At the time, sophisticated taste was turning away from Picasso, especially in the United States. There was no question that Picasso was the most famous artist in the world, but even observers who weren’t inclined to dismiss some of his recent work as kitsch or camp tended to believe that his best work was behind him and that his significance for the present and the future depended on what he had done a generation and more earlier. Even in Europe, Picasso’s grand mythological themes and unabashed fascination with the human figure, while they received a good deal of attention, were seen as having little or no impact on art’s inexorable forward march. Many students of twentieth-century art had come to regard modernism as an impersonal evolutionary process, with each successive movement—impressionism, postimpressionism, fauvism, cubism, neoplasticism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism—viewed as an almost Pavlovian reaction to what had come before. Richardson would have none of it.
Richardson saw that however much contemporary museumgoers might scoff at the old vision of the artist as a heroic figure, they still craved an adrenalin shot of divine inspiration—even if divinity looked very different than when Vasari was writing about Michelangelo in the sixteenth century. Richardson’s Picasso is an unpredictable, kaleidoscopic genius—a quick-change artist, maybe even a trickster—but a more consistent personality would have been incapable of responding to modernity, with its shifting perspectives, philosophies, tastes, fashions, fancies, and fantasies. The first volume of Richardson’s Picasso, published in 1991, contributed to a dramatic shift in our understanding of the man, which had begun soon after the his death in 1973. There was the publication in 1974 of André Malraux’s lyrical celebration of the late work, La Tête d’obsidienne (translated as Picasso’s Mask); the retrospective that filled every nook and cranny of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1980; the exhibition A New Spirit in Painting, at the Royal Academy in London in 1981, which brought Picasso’s late work together with canvases by artists who were only in their thirties and forties at the time; and the opening of the Musée Picasso in Paris in 1985.
In Richardson’s pages Picasso emerges, if not exactly as our contemporary, then certainly as a man we see clearly, warts and all, his contradictions and complexities presented with a sympathy that is somehow both dispassionate and impassioned. In the catalog of Picasso: Mosqueteros—the first in the series of brilliant exhibitions that he mounted with the support of the art dealer Larry Gagosian—Richardson observes that in his last years Picasso “felt free to do whatever he wanted, in whatever way he wanted, regardless of correctness, political, social, or artistic.” He goes on to say that “thirty-five years after his death, Picasso looks fresh and young and way ahead of the pack.” Richardson’s biography, composed in a spirit of literary generosity, makes it possible for us to see Picasso up close, much as the author saw the artist when he was a young man. John Richardson is such a beautiful writer—so deft, so beguiling, so supremely readable—that we are sometimes in danger of forgetting what a wise man he also is. In The Sorcerer’s Apprentice he’s only beginning to figure it all out.
—JED PERL,
July 1, 2019