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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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