From 1950 to 1962, John Richardson lived near Picasso in France and was a friend of the artist. After Picasso's death, his widow Jacqueline collaborated in the preparation of this work, giving Richardson access to Picasso's studio and papers.
Picasso: Sein Leben Reihe
Diese umfassende Biografie taucht tief in das Leben und Werk eines der einflussreichsten Künstler des 20. Jahrhunderts ein. Mit einem beispiellosen Zugang zum persönlichen Leben, Atelier und den Unterlagen des Künstlers bietet der Autor eine intime und detaillierte Erkundung seiner kreativen Reise. Die Reihe verwebt aufschlussreiche Kunstanalysen mit persönlichen Anekdoten und präsentiert so ein facettenreiches Porträt des Mannes hinter den ikonischen Meisterwerken. Ein Muss für jeden, der sich für Kunstgeschichte, Kreativität und die fesselnde Geschichte künstlerischen Genies interessiert.
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"My work is like a diary," Picasso once told John Richardson. "To understand it, you have to see how it mirrors my life." Richardson, who lived near the artist in Provence for ten years and became a trusted friend, was able to observe and record this phenomenon at first hand. Later, Picasso's widow continued to give Richardson access to the artist's studios and storerooms. This close personal friendship and the privilege of working in hitherto inaccessible archives make Richardson uniquely qualified to write the artist's life, rescuing his renown from sensationalist legend and specialist pleading and analyzing anew the traumas and obsessions that triggered his explosive genius. Richardson is the first biographer to make sense of the myriad contradictions that leave so many statements about Picasso's nature equally true in reverse. The artist's ambivalence is one of the author's central themes. At last we are able to see how his courage and terror misogyny and tenderness, generosity and thrift, superstition and skepticism, cynicism and sentiment, are reflected in the conflicts and paradoxes in his work. Richardson's eye is finely attuned to the complexities of Picasso's art, and his extensive knowledge of cultural history enables him to show how Picasso plundered the art of the past, the imaginations of his poet friends, the beliefs of mystics and magi, to create a revolutionary new synthesis. The author's evocation of Picasso's ferocious ego, demonic loves and hates and black fears is the more absorbing for its terse and lively prose and freedom from jargon. This first volume of Richardson's prodigiously detailed and documented four-volume study takes Picasso to the age of twenty-five. It reveals how the adolescent Picasso struggled, through determination and study, to escape the shadow of his father's artistic failures. It describes his precocious success in Barcelona and Paris and the period of rejection and despair that followed. We watch Picasso transform the prostitutes of the Saint-Lazare prison into Blue period madonnas and, later, the performers of the Montmartre circuses into Rose period harlequins. Volume I culminates in Picasso's dawning perception of himself as the messiah of the modern movement. Some nine hundred illustrations, many of them unfamiliar, enable the reader to follow Picasso's mesmerizing development in images as well as words.
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A Life of Picasso
- 512 Seiten
- 18 Lesestunden
The first volume of this biography emphasized Picasso's Spanish roots from Malaga to Barcelona. This second volume covers ten pivotal years of Picasso's life. It describes his relationship with Cocteau, his affair with Fernande Olivier, and the influence of women on his art.
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The author introduces material on the artist's early training in religious art, and establishes his passion for Barcelona and Catalan "modernisme". There are also portraits of Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Gertrude Stein who made up "The Picasso Gang". The book won the 1991 Whitbread biography award.
