Engrossing and revealing material, supplemented by innumerable reproductions of Picasso’s paintings and many period photos.
The biography’s long-awaited third volume finds the prolific artist at work in Italy, Spain and France.
Richardson (Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters: Beaton, Capote, Dalí, Picasso, Freud, Warhol, and More, 2001, etc.) lives up to expectations, delivering another fastidious examination of the painter’s life. He opens with Picasso and poet/filmmaker Jean Cocteau in Rome, working together on materials for Sergei Diaghilev’s 1917 ballet, Parade. Richardson makes note of Picasso and Cocteau’s dalliances with the dancers and documents the painter’s flirtation with the Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova, which ultimately resulted in marriage. Their tumultuous relationship forms a generous portion of this weighty tome. The author spots early warning signs that their relationship was doomed. Picasso continued indulging his addiction to whorehouses, for example, while sequestering Olga in his Parisian villa in 1917 and ’18. This period also saw the cementing of his friendship with musician Erik Satie. The most interesting sections contain Richardson’s interpretations of Picasso’s art in relation to his always-unstable personal life. The paintings of Olga in particular, the biographer notes, undergo a remarkable transformation from affectionate portraits to images “seething with ridicule and rage.” The birth of their son Paulo in 1921 did nothing to halt Picasso’s affairs with other women. In 1927, he began his famous liaison with teenage Marie-Thérèse Walter, chronicled in lurid detail that documents the artist’s sadomasochistic tendencies. Asides on Cocteau’s and Satie’s lives provide a welcome diversion as this period unfolds. Richardson chronicles Cocteau’s hopeless opium addiction and notes that Picasso was so close to Satie that he found it “too painful” to attend the composer’s funeral. The author also makes some interesting points on latter-day bidding wars over Picasso’s works, describing Dream, painted not long before the volume closes in 1932, as “sullied” by its $139 million price tag and its current resting place in a Las Vegas casino.
Engrossing and revealing material, supplemented by innumerable reproductions of Picasso’s paintings and many period photos.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-26665-1
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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