a life of picasso the prodigy 1881 1906 john richardson

Patrician in his speech and attire, Richardson had lived in New York since 1960 and his 5,000 square foot loft on Fifth Avenue included art by Andy Warhol, Georges Braques and, of course, Picasso, who died in 1973. At the age of 85, he'd go sailing off into studio and work all night long.' 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. 'He was like a human cannibal in that way. There was never a dull moment,' he told The Associated Press in 1991, adding that Picasso seemed inspired by his friends. 'It must have been hell to be his child or his mistress but to his friends he was beguiling. 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. Like Leon Edel's five-volume epic on Henry James and Richard Ellmann's 'James Joyce,' Richardson's books were regarded as biographies of the highest literary quality, graced by knowledge, poetry, passion and insight. But he did not immediately know the title, what years it would cover or when it would be published.Īrt lovers had looked forward to Richardson's Picasso writings the way readers of politics have anticipated Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson series. Latimer said that Richardson had been well into a fourth volume, in the works for over a decade.

The London-born Richardson's first Picasso book, 'A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881-1906' came out in 1991, and was followed by editions covering 32. Knopf, said Richardson died Tuesday morning at his Manhattan home. Nicholas Latimer, a vice president and senior director of publicity at Alfred A. NEW YORK (AP) - Sir John Richardson, the eminent historian and critic whose multivolume series on Pablo Picasso drew upon his personal and aesthetic affinity for the Spanish painter and was widely praised as a work of art in its own right, has died.

A life of picasso the prodigy 1881 1906 john richardson