JASPER REES: When making Picasso’s acquaintance, did you feel at once privileged and aware that this would at some future date be useful to you? Richardson reminisced about life in Provence with theartsdesk. In London he has curated shows at the Gagosian Gallery, including Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (1945-1962), which more or less covers his own period in the inner circle. His first was a nine-room retrospective in New York in 1962. His total Picassian immersion is manifested not only in the biography but also in curatorial forays. The most recent volume to appear was The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932. Five years later came The Cubist Rebel, 1907-1916.
Richardson escaped after a dozen years to Manhattan, where he became the head of Christies and the quintessentially wry Englishman in New York, where at 86 he remains.Ī Life of Picasso began its long gestation in 1991 with the publication of The Prodigy, 1881-1906. The end was nigh when Richardson identified some Légers as fakes, which Cooper had missed. But he was more jealous of Richardson’s connoisseurial talent. The relationship was unofficially an open one, but Cooper was tyrannically jealous.
Richardson was taken up by Douglas Cooper in London after the war. Where the biography is a vast monument, the memoir is a more intimate, dashed-off sketch, in which Richardson hangs out with Picasso, gets guided tours round his studio, goes to bullfights with him, befriends his ex-mistress Dora Maar and his second wife Jacqueline Roque.
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