A Life of PicassoA Life of Picasso

The 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; his muses Marie-Thérèse, Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot; and much more. 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-Thérèse 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 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 Marr and inspire a brilliant new sequence of paintings.