The fourth and final volume of Picasso's life is set in Paris, Normandy, the south of France, Royan, and Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and at the beginning of World War II.
Part of the value of Richardson’s work on Picasso—this final volume, published two years after his death in 2019, is the fourth in his biography of the artist—is his painstaking examination of evidence, taking no one, least of all Picasso, at their word ... There are times in Richardson’s book when he is too anxious to join Picasso in his view of the women in his life, referring, for example, to Olga on the very first page as 'a termagant' and insisting on the very last page that Dora Maar, a later lover, 'thrived on punishment.' Still, one of the reasons why Richardson’s life of Picasso is essential is that he is always willing to seek biographical sources for Picasso’s images. He leaves it to the reader to conclude that many of the paintings that are filled with hatred are not among Picasso’s best, that the tensions and high emotions that poisoned his personal life are sometimes too graphically apparent in them, with no room for mystery, or indeed subtlety. He also leaves it to the reader to face the uncomfortable fact that other such paintings have a startling energy, a rich and dynamic power ... this last volume, roughly half the size of the others, can be most usefully read alongside Josep Palau i Fabre’s Picasso 1927–1939: From the Minotaur to Guernica (2011) ... Because, unlike Richardson, he could use color illustrations on every page, his books offer a more concrete, graphic account of Picasso’s progress. We see more vividly in Palau’s book Picasso’s obsessive engagement with Marie-Thérèse.
... no studiedly dry academic treatise, but a portrait of the artist by a longtime friend ... The advantage is that Richardson and, by extension, we have intimate access to the painter not only at the easel but at home and at the bullfight and on the run from one lover to another, and on, and on ... The disadvantage of Richardson’s closeness to Picasso is an occasional lapse into an embarrassing chattiness ... as much a portrait of an age, in all its color and its tragic, and often trivial, goings-on, as it is a biography of one of the titans of that age ... Richardson is slow to display sympathy for any of Picasso’s loves.
[Richardson is] a fluent writer with a gift for narrative and a sensitive ability to read the artist’s work in relation to his life ... Throughout the biography, Richardson invariably refers to women by their first names and men by their last names, although the undeniably masculine Gertrude Stein is occasionally granted the dignity of her surname. Once out of short pants, Pablo becomes Picasso. The infantilizing gesture toward female figures, no doubt unconscious, is revealing. Although Richardson is frank about Picasso’s misogyny, his tone is breezy ... compromised by coy aggrandizement of the artist’s work and complicity with his behavior ... It is this broader cultural myth, founded on context-dependent prior beliefs, that requires interrogation, not by censorship, but by discussion, a discussion that is absent from Richardson’s biography.
