Tuesday, May 11, 2010

A Life of Picasso

I am just a chapter or two from finishing John Richardson's three-volume biography, A Life of Picasso. It has taken me two months of careful reading as Richardson has meticulously reconstructed the years between 1900 and 1930. As much as witnessing the growth and evolution of Picasso, it paints an intimate picture of the sweep of that era; especially for the "lost generation" of artists, musicians, and writers that represent the canon of modern arts.

That so many of their lives were integrated among each other and that their lives were no less susceptible to the waste, pitfalls, hedonism, and misadventures of our current "rich and famous" was made very real on every page.

The lives of Picasso and Stravinsky, Fitzgerald and Diaghilev were protean, ambitious, and ripe with risk-taking within their disciplines. They also led lives of selfishness, conceit, and cruelty. The Muse that entices artists to produce eternal masterpieces also seems to reconcile them to a temporal life that is less than familial, neighborly, or tolerant; at least as told by Richardson.

The lives of Picasso were alternately chillingly harsh and tenderly humane, breath-takingly break-neck and endlessly entertained by leisure. There is no accounting for the scope of his ambition and output. It is humbling. That it came at such a price for those he knew and "loved" gives the "value of art" a new meaning for me.

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