The artist as a middle-aged man

It’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves at the outset, as we reach the third volume of John Richardson’s stupendous biography of Picasso, exactly where we are. Picasso died in April 1973, aged 91, and it comes as something of a shock to realise that at the end of this volume, in 1932, he’s a middle-aged man entering his fifties: yet he had another 40 years to go. Is it this that daunts us when we try to weigh up the man and his work — his longevity, his century-straddling superhuman productivity? When we think of the kind of artist he was, or even the kind of genius he was, Archilochus’s old adage comes to mind — particularly useful when we come face to face with prodigious gifts: ‘The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Picasso is a fox-category genius, like Mozart, like Leonardo, like Shakespeare, as opposed to the hedgehog-category (Matisse, Brahms, Proust).

Picasso ‘knew’ too much, his energies were profligate, almost out of control, as Richardson makes clear in his exhaustive, fascinating account of this 15-year period of the artist’s crowded life. The volume begins as the first world war drags on to its bleak conclusion. Picasso, aged 35, already famous and wealthy, is in Rome working on the costumes and scenery for the Ballet Russe’s Parade, Cocteau and Diaghilev’s ballet with music by Satie. Indeed dance came to characterise much of the next decade as Picasso collaborated on other ballets (Tricorne Pulcinella, Mercure). Richardson is very astute on the ups and downs of these ballet projects (as a young man Richardson was a ballet critic himself) and without this illumination one might easily forget just how much a man of the theatre Picasso was (as well as everything else). He married one of the Ballet Russe dancers, Olga Khokhlova, in 1918 and it’s a further revelation to see to what extent his social and personal life involved dancers, choreographers and impresarios as well as fellow artists and dealers.