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.

The fourth and final volume...is just as rich, just as astounding [as the previous volumes] ... A brilliant detective, Richardson is continually solving 'crimes' (read 'artworks') by tracing them back to Picasso’s lovers and his dead sister. It’s mostly convincing, but it starts to feel reductive ... Richardson’s big thesis is that Picasso saw art in terms of magic, especially of exorcism and sacrifice. I think he is basically right. What is hard to swallow is the repetitiveness of Richardson’s idea of Picasso’s particular brand of 'magic,' which so often sprouts from his feelings about the women in his life ... You expect a biographer to emphasize biographical readings. But it’s a caution that we might apply more generally. What we know about an artist’s life shouldn’t be recruited to secure us against what is wild and unknown in his or her art.

There’s a gamy, taurine flavour to Richardson’s volume IV ... Richardson pores over it line by line, toggling from the canvases to the life and back again, drawing on his own experience of Picasso and long immersion in his oeuvre. We follow Picasso’s hot and cold affairs, his protean experimentation, the intrusion of world events into his field of vision. In a persuasive interpretation of the masterpiece Guernica, Richardson describes not only Picasso’s rage and grief over the civil war in his Spanish homeland but the never-forgotten loss of his sister Conchita, who died in childhood ... With this gripping, highly readable and thoughtfully illustrated volume, Richardson finally takes his leave of the artist in 1943. The last three decades of Picasso’s life proved to be beyond him. An editor’s note records the labours of bringing this volume to publication, crediting Ross Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga as Richardson’s collaborators, but offers no clue about his possible successor. It’s hard to imagine that he could be bettered as our guide in the labyrinth of the minotaur.

The biographer’s gift lay in fusing the personal and impersonal, his experience as an art student and jobbing critic, the stoic’s sense with an epicurean sensibility ... 'Guernica,' the monumental canvas commissioned by the Spanish Republican government lamenting the bombing of the Basque town of the same name, is spared Richardson’s disapproval—there were plenty of shortsighted contemporaries for that, Luis Buñuel and Anthony Blunt among them. Its stand-alone treatment, however, relies heavily, and disappointingly, on secondhand perspective ... The Minotaur Years misses Richardson’s keen sense of an ending...trails off with Picasso mining earlier material for his largest wartime composition, 'L’Aubade,' and the related 'Reclining Nude.' No rousing last words—but the last word on Picasso, just the same.

This posthumous volume is briefer than its predecessors and was evidently produced with difficulty: Richardson suffered from macular degeneration, which allowed him to see paintings but caused him trouble with print, and he needed help from collaborators whose actual contribution to the book is unclear. All the same, it’s sad that there won’t be a fifth instalment, or a sixth, to follow the subject into his fecund, defiant old age. After Picasso, Dora Maar at least had God; Richardson’s Picasso won’t be so easy to replace.

This is the fourth volume in art historian Richardson’s phenomenally detailed and unfailingly perceptive biography of a protean artist he knew personally. This granted him unique access to invaluable material, including diaries and magnetizing photographs, many documenting Picasso’s key involvement with surrealist photographer Dora Maar ... Richardson, who died in 2019, has given the world a magnificently illuminating, vital, and invaluable biography covering two-thirds of the complex life of a perpetually rejuvenating titan of art.

... a well-analyzed finale ... Richardson is strongest in his intensely detailed examination of Picasso’s works, major and minor alike. Richardson spends less time analyzing Picasso as a person, though he does make connections between Picasso’s life and art ... While the final chapters, which detail the end of Picasso’s marriage, his survival through Nazi Occupation, and the creation of his major wartime work L’Aubade, feel less polished than earlier sections, they still provide plenty of insight. Fans of the series will find this a satisfying conclusion.

The final chapter of a magisterial biography ... grand, highly detailed, and intimate ... The author’s unique, extensive knowledge and insider information about Picasso—both the man and artist—informs insightful explications of the nuances and symbolism in Picasso’s works; his personal relationships with other artists, writers, and women; and his work habits ... This final, lavishly illustrated volume softly slips away with Richardson continuing to chronicle Picasso obsessively creating ... A quiet, satisfying ending to a masterful accomplishment.