RICHARDSON'S life of Picasso has left all contenders at the back of the queue, if that is not an Irish bull. The first volume traced the painter's hard, rather deprived youth and his early, struggling years in Paris, including his setting up house with his long-time mistress Fernande Olivier. In this, the second volume, we see the outsider rise slowly but inexorably up the ladder and make Cubism an international style - even if he and Braque, his closest artist-friend, never recognised their progeny.
The book covers a mere decade much of it troubled, but those few years were still probably the best and most creative in Picasso's life, and in his later, world-famous days he often looked back on them with nostalgia and even a kind of self-envy.
What emerges clearly is that from very early on, he was aware of himself as a special force, an Event, and he was able to make others believe so too. Even in the poverty-stricken period of the Bateau Lavoir, his run-down Paris studio in a working-class quarter he had followers the so-called Bande a Picasso, which included people of genuine calibre such as the poet, eccentric and later martyr of the Nazis, Max Jacob.
Picasso was, in a sense, intensely ambitious: he desired fame, success, status, even money, but only on his own terms, and he was never inclined to compromise himself as an artist for any of these aims. He was a fanatical worker, capable of long, solitary hours, days or even weeks in his studio, and he was indifferent to received opinions or the fashions of the moment. The world, he believed, would come to him in the end, and so it did.
The relationship with Braque, his closest intimate and partner in the Cubist adventure, has led both to endless scholarly research and to endless speculation. Picasso was undoubtedly the more daring and exploratory of the duo, but Richardson shows that in turn Braque taught him his own standards of fine craftsmanship, encouraging him to be more careful in his use of matiere and to strive for technical patience and "finish". Incidentally, since Gertrude Stein inevitably figures a good deal in the narrative, it is interesting to read Braque's blunt, even contemptuous dismissal of her opinions and writings about Cubism, and indeed about modern art in general. In his opinion, her French was always too elementary to follow the intense discussions and theorising of those crucial years.
As for Picasso's close literary friend, the poet Apollinaire, he too seems to have had little innate visual sense, though he was a superb publicist and propagandist for his artist friends. His personal charm, as well as his oddities and notoriously seamy side, come out strongly even in such a star-studded cast, and it is plain that in his own right Apollinaire was a "star". Juan Gris, a humble follower of Picasso when he arrived from Madrid at the Bateau Lavoir, is another key personage of this extraordinary milieu, who in his relatively short life rose to equality with his (living) masters and painted perhaps the finest works of the "Synthetic" phase of Cubism. Braque, it appears, resented him as an artistic upstart and Picasso's own attitude was ambivalent, yet he grieved sincerely at Gris's untimely death, and in my opinion the master ended by learning something from the pupil.
Derain, one of the Masked Men of 20th-century art, is treated rather offhandedly, although his stock has risen again in the past decade or so. Modigliani makes occasional on-stage appearances, but there is relatively little about Leger and almost nothing about Chagall. And though Richardson is no doubt justified in his contempt for such pseudo-Cubists as Lhote, Gleizes, Metzinger, etc., his blanket dismissal of the Section d'Or wing of the movement does sound too sweeping. After all, it included Jacques Villon and Roger de Ia Fresnaye, both major painters by any standard.
The first World War made things difficult for Picasso, an alien in France where any young adult male not in uniform was an object of suspicion, and xenophobia ran unchecked. Braque and Apollinaire both became trench heroes (Braque especially) while Leger, Derain and certain others had excellent war records, and even Cocteau drove an ambulance. Picasso's long-standing affair with Fernande Olivier lasted uneasily through bad times but collapsed finally when he went looking for a wife, or at least a suitable long-term mate (she herself did not fill the bill, for various reasons).
He settled on Eva Gouel, a pretty, slightly shadowy girl who was a model of domesticity but died soon after they had set up house together. There is also a strange, quasi-farcical yet sinister episode in which he and Apollinaire "kidnapped" the bohemian, strong-minded Irene Lagut and locked her in a house from which she easily escaped (later, she went back to Picasso voluntarily, but again the relationship petered out).
By now the art dealers were seeking out the work of the man already seen as the coming genius of Modernism, though he was wary of them and resented his early treatment at their hands - which in fact he never quite forgave. By now, too, Cocteau was drawing him into the fashionable world of stage design with the Diaghilev ballet Parade, and when the book ends we see Picasso poised both for social reclame and for his unfortunate first marriage to the ballerina Olga Kokhlova. The years of international fame and worldly success lay just ahead, but the period of golden youth and obscurity, poverty and close companionships, idealism and harsh struggle for mere survival, was already past.