A Life of Picasso Volume IV : The Minotaur Years: 1933-1943

Magnificent, unparalleled... How [Volume IV] manages to be as gripping as it is, as fresh as it is, only the gods of art can answer... Richardson is both an intimate witness and a ravenous historian... No one will ever again be able to combine Richardson's personal familiarity with Picasso with such impressive levels of history, insight, detail, gossip and breezy writing. The greatest art biography ever written can never have a proper ending. It's an incomplete masterpiece. But a masterpiece nevertheless. - Sunday Times

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 Brassai to Picasso's chateau in Normandy, Boisgeloup, where he would take his iconic photographs of the celebrated plaster busts of Picasso's lover Marie-Therese Walter.

Picasso was contributing to Andre Breton's Minotaur magazine and spending time with the likes of Man Ray, Salvador Dali, Lee Miller, and the poet Paul Eluard, 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 Francoise 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.

A Times Art Books of the Year 2022

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