The author introduces material on the artist's early training in religious art, and establishes his passion for Barcelona and Catalan "modernisme". There are also portraits of Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Gertrude Stein who made up "The Picasso Gang". The book won the 1991 Whitbread biography award.

The third volume of Richardson’s magisterial Life of Picasso, a groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. Here is Picasso at the height of his powers in Rome and Naples, producing the sets and costumes with Cocteau for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and visiting Pompei where the antique statuary fuel his obsession with classicism; in Paris, creating some of his most important sculpture and painting as part of a group that included Braque, Apollinaire, Miró, and Breton; spending summers in the South of France in the company of Gerald and Sara Murphy, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. These are the years of his marriage to the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova—the mother of his only legitimate child, Paulo—and of his passionate affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was, as well, his model and muse.

A three-volume study of the life and work of Pablo Picasso captures the artist from his early life in Málaga and Barcelona, through his revolutionary Cubist period, to the height of his talent in prewar Europe.

Drawing on exhaustive research from interviews and unpublished archival material, John Richardson has produced the long-awaited third volume of the definitive biography, full of original, groundbreaking new insights into Picasso's life and work. His lively and incisive analysis of the work meshes seamlessly with the rich and detailed narrative of this complex and sensual life. The Triumphant Years reveals Picasso at the height of his powers, producing not only the costumes and sets for such Diaghilev Ballets Russes productions as Parade and Tricorne but some of his most important sculpture and paintings. These are tumultuous years, Picasso torn between marital respectability with Olga, the Russian ballerina who was his first wife, and the erotic passion of his mistress, Marie-Therese. This extraordinary biography ends with the completion of a dramatic series of drawings of the crucifixion. From then on the horrors of war would replace any private horrors, leading ultimately to Picasso's masterpiece, Guernica.

A three-volume study of the life and work of Pablo Picasso captures the artist from his early life in Málaga and Barcelona, through his revolutionary Cubist period, to the height of his talent in prewar Europe.

This first biography of the Kettle's Yard artists reveals the life of a visionary who helped shape twentieth-century British art and explores a thrilling moment in the history of modernism 'The beautiful, revelatory biography we have been waiting for. I loved it' EDMUND DE WAAL 'This book is the legacy Jim Ede might have wished for' OBSERVER The lives of Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard artists represent a thrilling tipping point in twentieth-century modernism: a new guard, a new way of making and seeing, and a new way of living with art. The artists Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Alfred Wallis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were not a set like the Bloomsbury Set or Ravilious and his friends. But Jim Ede recognised in each of the artists he championed something common and kindred, some quality of light and life and line. Jim Ede is the figure who unites them. His vision continues to influence the way we understand art and modern living. He was a man of extraordinary energies: a collector, dealer, fixer, critic and, above all, friend to artists. For Ede, works of art were friends and art could be found wherever you looked - in a pebble, feather or seedhead. Art lived and a life without art, beauty, friendship and creativity was a life not worth living. Art was not for galleries alone and it certainly wasn't only for the rich. At Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, he opened his home and his collection to all comers. He showed generations of visitors that learning to look could be a whole new way of life.

The beautifully illustrated fourth volume of Picasso’s life—set in France and Spain during the Spanish Civil War and World War II—covers friendships with the surrealist painters; artistic inspiration around Guernica and the Minotaur; and his muses Marie-Thérèse, Dora Maar, and Françoise Gilot; and much more. Including 271 stunning illustrations and drawing on original and exhaustive research from interviews and never-before-seen material in the Picasso family archives, this book opens with a visit by the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï to Picasso’s chateau in Normandy, Boisgeloup, where he would take his iconic photographs of the celebrated plaster busts of Marie-Thérèse, Picasso’s mistress and muse. Picasso was contributing to André Breton’s Minotaur magazine and he was also spending more time with the likes of Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Lee Miller, and the poet Paul Éluard, in Paris as well as in the south of France. It was during this time that Picasso began writing surrealist poetry and became obsessed with the image of himself as the mythic Minotaur—head of a bull, body of a man—and created his most famous etching, Minotauromachie. Richardson shows us the artist is as prolific as ever, painting Marie-Thérèse, but also painting the surrealist photographer Dora Maar who has become a muse, a collaborator and more. In April 1937, the bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War inspires Picasso’s vast masterwork of the same name, which he paints in just a few weeks for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair. When the Nazis occupy Paris in 1940, Picasso chooses to remain in the city despite the threat that his art would be confiscated. In 1943, Picasso meets Françoise Gilot who would replace Dora, and as Richardson writes, “rejuvenate his psyche, reawaken his imagery and inspire a brilliant sequence of paintings.” As always, Richardson tells Picasso’s story through his work during this period, analyzing how it shows what the artist was feeling and thinking. His fascinating and accessible narrative immerses us in one of the most exciting moments in twentieth century cultural history, and brings to a close the definitive and critically acclaimed account of one of the world’s most celebrated artists.

"Describes with plenty of colour how surrealism, from Rene Magritte's bowler hats to Salvador Dali's watches, was born and developed." - The Times (UK) As she did for the Modernists In Montmartre, noted art historian and biographer Sue Roe now tells the story of the Surrealists in Montparnasse. In Montparnasse begins on the eve of the First World War and ends with the 1936 unveiling of Dalí’s Lobster Telephone. As those extraordinary years unfolded, the Surrealists found ever more innovative ways of exploring the interior life, and asking new questions about how to define art. In Montparnasse recounts how this artistic revolution came to be amidst the salons and cafés of that vibrant neighborhood. Sue Roe is both an incisive art critic of these pieces and a beguiling biographer with a fingertip feel for this compelling world. Beginning with Duchamp, Roe then takes us through the rise of the Dada movement, the birth of Surrealist photography with Man Ray, the creation of key works by Ernst, Cocteau, and others, through the arrival of Dalí. On canvas and in their readymades and other works these artists juxtaposed objects never before seen together to make the viewer marvel at the ordinary—and at the workings of the subconscious. We see both how this art came to be and how the artists of Montparnasse lived. Roe puts us with Gertrude Stein in her box seat at the opening of The Rite of Spring; with Duchamp as he installs his famous urinal; at a Cocteau theatrical with Picasso and Coco Chanel; with Breton at a session with Freud; and with Man Ray as he romances Kiki de Montparnasse. Stein said it best when she noted that the Surrealists still saw in the common ways of the 19th century, but they complicated things with the bold new vision of the 20th. Their words mark an enormously important watershed in the history of art—and they forever changed the way we all see the world.

Although Pablo Picasso spotted Dora Maar at a cafe in January 1936 it is highly likely that she had come to his attention prior. As Brassaï, a Hungarian-French photographer, recalled, 'It was at Les Deux-Magots that, one day in autumn 1935, [he] met Dora. On an earlier day, he had already noticed the grave, drawn face of the young woman at a nearby table, the attentive look in her light-colored eyes, sometimes disturbing in its fixity. When Picasso saw her in the same cafe in the company of the surrealist poet Paul Éluard, who knew her, the poet introduced her to Picasso' (Brassaï, a.k.a. Gyula Halász, Conversations with Picasso [University of Chicago Press, 1999]). Tinged with a seductive mix of violence and dark eroticism, this first meeting has attained mythical status in the story of the artist's life. It reads like an unreal fantasy. A mysterious and feline beauty, which Man Ray had captured in the pictures he took of her, a companion of Georges Bataille, Dora was an accomplished photographer, close to the Surrealists revolutionary aesthetics. Picasso addressed her in French, which he assumed to be her language; she replied in Spanish, which she knew to be his. For the next decade, the painter would translate not just his fascination with the woman who had seduced him on the spot, but also his desire to escape the grip of someone who, for the first time, could intellectually aspire to be his equal. Dora would appear in his works as a female Minotaur, a Sphinx, a lunar goddess and a muse. Because of her intense artistic sensibility, her poetic gifts and her ability to participate in suffering, she was especially qualified to resonate Picasso's own inner torments during these troubled years.

'A masterpiece' Sunday Times 'Magisterial... thrilling' Guardian 'Terrifically enjoyable' Daily Telegraph The beautifully illustrated, long-awaited final volume of John Richardson's magisterial Life of Picasso, drawing on original research from interviews and never-before-seen material in the Picasso family archives. The Minotaur Years opens in 1933 with a visit by the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï to Picasso's château in Normandy, Boisgeloup, where he would take his iconic photographs of the celebrated plaster busts of Picasso's lover Marie-Thérèse Walter. Picasso was contributing to André Breton's Minotaur magazine and spending time with the likes of Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Lee Miller, and the poet Paul Éluard, in Paris and the south of France. It was during this time that Picasso began writing surrealist poetry and became obsessed with the image of himself as the mythic Minotaur. Richardson shows us the artist being as prolific as ever, painting Walter, as well as the surrealist photographer Dora Maar, who became a muse, collaborator and lover. The bombing of Guernica in April 1937 would inspire Picasso's vast masterwork of the same name, which he painted in just a few weeks for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World's Fair. When the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, Picasso chose to remain in the city despite the threat that his art would be confiscated. In 1943, Picasso met Françoise Gilot who would replace Maar and inspire a brilliant new sequence of paintings. As always, Richardson tells Picasso's story through his work, analysing how it shows what the artist was feeling and thinking. His fascinating and illuminating narrative immerses us in one of the most exciting moments in twentieth-century cultural history, and brings to a close the definitive and critically acclaimed biography of one of the world's most celebrated artists.