The third volume of John Richardson's magisterial biography charts Picasso's life through his 'triumphant years'

The scale of this biography is astonishing. The third volume of A Life of Picasso, by John Richardson, takes us up to Picasso’s fifty-first year with another forty productive years to go. Volume One, published in 1991, covered the years 1881 to 1906. Volume Two, The Painter of Modern Life, 1907–1917, appeared in 1996. The two books combined amount to more than a thousand pages and the present volume adds a further 500. It is an exceptional life that can stand 1,500 pages devoted to its first half-century and leave the reader wanting more. The subject, furthermore, is hardly an unfamiliar one.

The life of an artist is the oldest genre in modern art history, but Richardson is not a conventional biographer, and no naive recorder of “life into art”. There are telling moments when he aligns Picasso’s experience with acute observation of a particular work. He notes, for instance, how the painter endows “Nude Standing by the Sea” (1929) with “immensity” by taking the famous rock arches of 'Etretat as the model for the legs of his bather. To prove the point, Richardson reproduces Courbet’s celebrated “Cliffs of 'Etretat after a Storm” alongside a photograph of Picasso standing in front of the cliffs with Georges Braque and his wife. For the most part, however, Picasso comes in and out of focus in these pages, his life threaded into a rich and absorbing background. The book has the continuously moving quality of a film – aptly enough for the 1920s, when the new(ish)medium appealed to avant-garde and popular tastes alike. One minute Picasso is tracked as a figure set against a crowd of his contemporaries; the next we see him in close-up, the shaman of the studio. Richardson embeds Picasso in the Paris of the 1920s, the age of balls and masquerades, of parties and premieres, of windswept beach holidays on the Channel coast and hot exotic excursions to the C^ote d’Azur. Nobody has evoked Picasso’s lived, artistic circumstances so thoroughly, so surely.

Picasso put up with the antipathy of Derain and the resentment of Brancusi, who called him “a cannibal” because he allegedly stole from other artists after studio visits. (Robert Delaunay actually hated him – “hysterical is the only word for the painting of this sick tortured mind”). There is “the truce and renewal of the friendship” with Matisse, never easy, rarely close but mainly respectful. Touchingly, Picasso longed to restore his friendship with Georges Braque, which had lapsed during the First World War when Braque fought and was seriously wounded on the Western front. Braque remained cool and distant. In turn, Picasso gave as good as he got. He disliked modernist architecture and Marie Laurencin and harboured an ignoble jealousy and disdain for Juan Gris, his one true disciple. Nothing beats his praise of Dalí “for painting the smell of shit better than anyone else”. Richardson’s wide-angle lens also takes in the Gerald Murphys and their troublesome guests, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who were “a real problem”. Picasso found the alcoholic and exhibitionist Zelda “scary”. With a sound ear for gossip, Richardson dismisses the conjectural claims of the late W. S. Rubin that Picasso had “a mystic marriage” with Sara Murphy as “novelettish twaddle”.

Enlivening as this is, a strong theme nevertheless emerges. According to Richardson, Picasso’s embourgeoisement and the wealth and fame that attended it in the late teens and early 1920s leads to his partial emancipation and return to a form of bohemianism in the later 20s and early 30s. His marriage in 1918 to Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, marked the beginning of this process. Olga, one of the victims of twentieth-century art history, was beautiful and strong-willed, refusing, evidently, to sleep with the priapic Picasso until certain of marriage. They moved into rue La Boétie on the Right Bank, far from his old haunts with “their disgruntled cubists and former girl friends”, and set up house with “a white gloved butler, cook and maid”. Olga disliked Picasso’s old friends, particularly the poet Max Jacob, had expensive tastes and was determined to play the role of ma^itresse de maison, later ch^atelaine of their country house at Boisgeloup. She was the elegant wife of the most famous painter in the world, and so he depicted her, at first.

Richardson is careful not to guy her. Picasso “loved her as a proud Spanish husband” and he desperately wanted an heir. There was “a residual bourgeois streak” in Picasso: the addict of the whorehouse wanted the comforts of home and hearth. But Olga, “the unsmiling beauty”, was probably never up to it. Diaghilev warned Picasso against her from the start. The intemperate Arthur Rubinstein called her “a stupid Russian”. An eminent fellow ballerina, Alexandra Danilova, described her as “nothing – nice but nothing”. In October 1920, after an idyllic holiday at Juan-les-Pins with Picasso, Clive Bell found her back in Paris “so lonely, so miserable, so neglected”. Even Sara Murphy snapped: “Olga is so prosaic”. As the decade wore on, her mysterious leg injuries gave way to gynaecological problems and haemorrhaging. There were loud, angry and violent domestic scenes. It all culminated in the terribilità of Picasso’s 1927–9 portraits of Olga, her head transformed into a vagina dentata.

Diaghilev and Jean Cocteau were two other ushers for what Jacob called the “Epoch of Duchesses”. Picasso designed three important ballets for Diaghilev: Parade, Tricorne and Pulcinella. Although they enjoyed a mixed success – Parade lasted only two performances on its initial engagement – they brought Picasso as much international fame as his art of the period. Debussy, Proust, Matisse, Chanel and a galaxy of artists and writers from Apollinaire to e. e. cummings, from Miró to Lipchitz, attended the first performance of Parade on May 18, 1917 – in the afternoon because of wartime blackouts. When Tricorne opened in London a year later, the Sitwells, T. S. Eliot and le tout Bloomsbury were in the stalls.

Picasso was characteristically ambivalent about Diaghilev. On the one hand, he admired in a general way the Russian’s support of modernist artists and composers. On the other, he sensed that Diaghilev’s “cult of the new was a showman’s gimmick rather than a matter of modernist conviction”. By the mid-1920s, the Dadaists and Surrealists regarded Diaghilev’s company as the epitome of bourgeois culture. Noisy demonstrations disrupted performances. Even Miró and Max Ernst were intimidated, and absented themselves from the first night of their Romeo and Juliet.

Jean Cocteau from an early age sought to inveigle himself into Picasso’s circle of male friends, and was the butt of Dada and Surrealist derision. To André Breton he was a “rich spoiled homosexual narcissist”. And from this biographer, too, Cocteau earns nothing but scorn and obloquy. Richardson notes his “genius as a pasticheur”, calls him “an egomaniacal star” and damns him as “not one to allow previous convictions to stand in the way of self-promotion”. He was “masochistically” in love with Picasso “but he was no kindred spirit . . . there was little ballast or depth to this jester”. When Picasso inadvertently let fall to a Spanish journalist what he really thought of his mercurial admirer (“his drawings are ever so graceful, his writings journalistic”), Cocteau was devastated, saved only, on his own troubling admission, “by mummy and the church”.

Throughout all the intrigues, the back-biting and the incessant social round, Picasso produced an astounding body of work in the 1920s and early 30s. Complex and contradictory, he works in every medium from painting and sculpture to drawings and printmaking, stage design and sketchbooks. Not a year goes by without a significant series or group of masterpieces. In the summer of 1921, on the eve of his fortieth birthday, Picasso and Olga took a house in Fontainebleau with a large adjacent coach house that was quickly requisitioned as a studio. In the space of three months he painted the two versions of the outsized “Three Musicians”, summations both of his portraiture, with their disguised images of Apollinaire, Jacob and himself, and of his grand Cubist manner; and the monumental “Three Women at the Spring” in a new-minted neoclassical style. In so doing, Picasso dramatically demonstrates that “cubism and classicism were two sides of the same coin”. These canvases hang today in the same room at MoMA, and their virtuosity still astonishes and stirs. In the brilliantly managed planes of “The Three Musicians”, Picasso registers himself as the genius of the present; in the voluptuous modelling of “The Three Women at the Spring” as the avatar of the past.

Tate Modern’s masterpiece, “The Dance” (1925), is the pivot on which Picasso’s art turns in the 1920s. Richardson’s witty and plausible suggestion that the frenzied maenad on the left of the picture is dancing the newly fashionable Charleston gives back to this expressive late Cubist picture its contemporaneity. It is a farewell to the ballet, to the world of public performance. And it is succeeded by “secret” images of a highly personal nature, such as the profile of Picasso’s dead companion of earlier years, Raymond Pichot. The following year (1926), Picasso fashioned his rebarbative images of guitars from rope, floor cloths, newsprint, nails and string, and impaled them on the canvas. They anticipate the Surrealist object and could hardly be further removed from bourgeois art and taste.

The Surrealists, from whom Picasso at first cagily kept his distance, hero-worshipped him and his art. Innately his art draws from the real world of persons and things rather than the dream life of the unconscious, but the old cannibal was out. The biomorphic drawings and paintings of bathers and the savage versions of Olga owe much to the new climate of forms and feeling created by the Surrealists. Unwittingly, they were the agents of his emancipation from the bonds of embourgeoisement.

In January 1927, he met the angel of his transformation: the seventeen-and-a-half-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter. Blonde, voluptuous and submissive, she became his obsession and his muse. She enters his art secretively at first, just as he kept her hidden from his public life. Gradually, his passion for her and what she released in him and his work overwhelmed bourgeois discretion. The period from 1927 until 1935, when she dominated Picasso’s art and life, Richardson unapologetically claims as “his most innovative after cubism”. The Triumphant Years comes to a climax in 1932 – an annus mirabilis for his work – when Marie-Thérèse Walter holds sway in every medium and every mood; awake, asleep, posing or at play, she is the vehicle of Picasso’s passion and the object of his lust. He could not have enough of her: he could not coin her image fast enough.

Curiously, the book goes out of focus right at the end when Richardson introduces General Juan Picasso, a distant uncle who wrote a famous report damning the disastrous performance of the Spanish Army at Annual in Morocco. The report undermined the Spanish monarchy and led to the rickety Republic of the 1930s. Suddenly we are on the brink of the Spanish Civil War. All this should have its time and place in Volume Four. Few readers will wait patiently for that, the next instalment of this great biography, a masterpiece of our time.

Patrick McCaughey is a former Director of the Yale Center for British Art. His Voyage and Landfall: The art of Jan Senbergs was published in 2006.