Description
The cubism years, by the man who knew Picasso best. John Richardson — Picasso’s friend, scholar, and the greatest Picasso biographer who ever lived — devoted his life to this monumental project. Volume II: 1907–1917 covers the most revolutionary decade in modern art: the birth of Cubism, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the wild Montmartre years with Braque, Apollinaire, and Gertrude Stein.
Richardson writes with insider authority and novelistic flair. He was there — not in 1907, but in Picasso’s later life, when the artist unburdened himself to the young Englishman over decades of conversation. The result is biography as privileged testimony: gossipy, erudite, and unmatched in its feel for the man behind the myth and the movement behind the man.
Read Volume I first if you can, but this volume stands alone as the essential account of Cubism’s invention. For anyone who wants to understand how modern art happened, start here. The scholarship is definitive; the storytelling is pure pleasure.
Between 1907 and 1917, Pablo Picasso tore up the rulebook of Western art — and redrew it. In the second volume of his definitive biography, John Richardson chronicles the decade in which Picasso, alongside Georges Braque, invented Cubism and became the defining painter of the modern age.
Drawing on personal knowledge, interviews, and archival research, Richardson follows Picasso from the shock of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon through the breakthroughs of analytic Cubism and collage, the bohemian ferment of prewar Paris, and the upheavals of World War I. Along the way we meet the lovers, friends, dealers, and rivals — from Braque and Gertrude Stein to Olga Khokhlova — who shaped the most innovative decade in modern art.
The essential continuation of the landmark biography, The Painter of Modern Life is indispensable for art lovers, students, and anyone who wants to understand how one restless genius changed the way we see. Erudite, vivid, and intimate, it is biography at its very best.
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