A Life of Picasso-Book Review

David Richardson introduces to the reader a clearly informed biography of Picasso's growth and failures. Continually engaging biography neither glorifies Picasso nor paints him as a brute. Conversational in tone, the book assembles a truly impressive amount of material. It's one of the few books truly essential to understanding Picasso's artistic and spiritual growth.

Pablo Picasso was born to a poor family in southern Spain in 1881. He started as a child prodigy and ended as the greatest painter of his century. After some early training with his father, a local drawing teacher, Picasso showed that he had thoroughly grasped the ways that artists make a picture look ?realistic? at a very young age. H

e then moved to Paris, where he quickly found like-minded poets and painters. His work began to attract serious critical attention and honor by the time he was twenty. His first mature work was around 1901, called ?The Blue Period.? He began also to come by mistress-muses; the women in his life would be his most consistent inspiration, as he reshaped their bodies in the boldest formal experiments. He always saw painting as a kind of sexual activity. While Picasso's relationships brought life into his painting, they often destroyed the lives of the women involved.

Richardson combines his discussion of individual paintings into a nearly flawless narrative story of Picasso's life. Richardson has checked everything that he could check, and referenced all the

Some topics in this essay:
Pablo Picasso, Synthetic Cubism, Blue Period, David Richardson, Occupation Richardson, Period Picasso, Picasso Paris, Cubism Picasso's, Party Picasso, Les Demoiselles, blue period,