Picasso: angel and monster

Andrew Lambirth talks to John Richardson, biographer and friend of the artist

John Richardson has spent a lifetime in the company of great art and artists, and is justly celebrated for his ability to evoke, explain and evaluate their work in beautiful prose. Best known as the biographer of Picasso, he has written about many other artists, including Manet and Braque, and has curated a number of seminal exhibitions since the Picasso retrospective he staged in New York in 1962. For the past 50 years he has lived in New York, though born in England in 1924. He was in London recently for the installation of his major new curatorial excursion, Picasso: The Mediterranean Years 1945–62 at Gagosian Gallery (6–24 Britannia Street, WC1, until 28 August). I found him on site, giving a genial but informative tour to gallery staff.

His command of the minutiae of his subject is enviable, and it’s difficult to believe that this charming and elegant man is 86. Although he must be exhausted from organising this extraordinary exhibition, co-curated with Picasso’s grandson Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, Richardson is still apparently full of energy and enthusiasm. To start us off, I ask him the inevitable question — why choose the Mediterranean period? ‘Because it had never been covered before as a totality. It’s a very complex period because so many different things are going on. Picasso revolutionises ceramics and engraving techniques — linocuts, for instance, in which he gets these extraordinary delicate effects — and the endless printing processes he works on with the Crommelynck brothers and the lithographer Mourlot in Paris. And then he tries a completely new way of sculpture, putting it together out of bits and pieces. The surrealists had done that a bit, but Picasso does it in the interests of reality.