In the original dust jacket. Cream cloth binding with black title on the spine.

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John Richardson draws on the same combination of lively writing, critical astuteness, exhaustive research, and personal experience which made a bestseller out of the first volume and vividly recreates the artist’s life and work during the crucial decade of 1907-17 – a period during which Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented Cubism and to that extent engendered modernism.

Richardson has had unique access to untapped sources and unpublished material. By harnessing biography to art history, he has managed to crack the code of cubism more successfully than any of his predecessors. And by bringing a fresh light to bear on the artist’s often too sensationalized private life, he has succeeded in coming up with a totally new view of this paradoxical man of his paradoxical work. Never before has Picasso’s prodigious technique, his incisive vision and not least his sardonic humour been analysed with such clarity.

Reviews: 

• John Richardson’s second volume on Picasso confirms what his first suggested: that this is a masterpiece in the making, the most illuminating biography yet written on a twentieth-century visual artist… A continuous pleasure to read — Richard Hughes

• • Magisterial…Richardson’s ambitious project dwarfs all previous biographies of Picasso… [He] has a gift for telling pen-portraits and makes vivid an entire gallery of pioneering dealers and early collectors. — Frances Spalding ― Sunday Times

• Richardson covers [the] momentous ten years from 1907 to the end of the First World War with great elegance and quiet authority… What makes the two published volumes so outstanding is the sense of Picasso the man emerging – in all his complexity – alongside the superb analysis of Picasso the artist — William Boyd ― Spectator
• John Richardson draws on the same combination of lively writing, critical astuteness, exhaustive research, and personal experience which made a bestseller out of the first volume and vividly recreates the artist’s life and work during the crucial decade of 1907-17 – a period during which Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented Cubism and to that extent engendered modernism. Richardson has had unique access to untapped sources and unpublished material. By harnessing biography to art history, he has managed to crack the code of cubism more successfully than any of his predecessors. And by bringing a fresh light to bear on the artist’s often too sensationalized private life, he has succeeded in coming up with a totally new view of this paradoxical man of his paradoxical work. Never before has Picasso’s prodigious technique, his incisive vision and not least his sardonic humour been analysed with such clarity.

Sir John Patrick Richardson, KBE, FBA (6 February 1924 – 12 March 2019) was a British art historian and biographer of Pablo Picasso. Richardson also worked as an industrial designer and as a reviewer for The New Observer.

In 1952, he moved to Provence, where he became friends with Picasso, Fernand Léger and Nicolas de Staël. In 1960, he moved to New York and organized a nine-gallery Picasso retrospective. Christie’s then appointed him to open their U.S. office, which he ran for the next nine years. In 1973 he joined New York gallery M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., as vice president in charge of 19th- and 20th-century painting, and later became managing director of Artemis, a mutual fund specializing in works of art.

In 1980 he started devoting all his time to writing and working on his Picasso biography. He was also a contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

In 1993, Richardson was elected to the British Academy and in 1995 he was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford. He was awarded France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2011 and in 2012 was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.