John Richardson (art historian)

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Sir John Richardson , KBE (born February 6, 1924 in London - † March 12, 2019 in New York City ) was a British art historian , art critic , curator and Picasso biographer.

life and work

John Patrick Richardson was born the eldest son of Sir Wodehouse Richardson, DSO , KCB , Quarter-Master General in the Boer War and founder of the British Empire's Army & Navy Store. At first he wanted to be an artist; It was from this time that he became acquainted with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud , who both later portrayed him. He enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art at the age of just 17 , was called up, but soon fell ill and spent the remainder of the war with his mother and siblings in London. During the day he worked as an industrial designer, but soon gave up the idea of ​​being an artist and ended up working as a reviewer for The Observer . In 1950 he met the English art historian and collector Douglas Cooper , with whom he lived for the next ten years.

Liaison with Douglas Cooper

In 1952 he moved to Provence , where Cooper acquired the Château de Castille near Avignon and transferred his collection there, giving the decrepit castle the character of a private museum of early Cubism . Cooper was already at home in the Parisian art scene before World War II and had also been involved in the art trade; Not least by building up his own collection, he got to know many artists personally and introduced them to his friend. Richardson became a close friend of Pablo Picasso , Fernand Léger and Nicolas de Staël . Even at this time he was interested in Picasso's portraits and thought of publishing about them; this finally resulted in his four-part Picasso biography A Life of Picasso more than 20 years later , the last volume of which has not yet been published.

new York

In 1960, Richardson separated from Cooper and moved to New York. In 1962 he organized a Picasso retrospective in nine galleries, and in 1964 a Braque retrospective. He then became director of Christie's for the United States for nine years . In 1973 he moved to Galerie M. Knoedler & Co., Inc. as Vice President for 19th and 20th Century Paintings, and later became manager of a fund specializing in works of art called Artemis (which Cooper tried to thwart). In 1980 he retired from business life to concentrate on writing primarily his Picasso biography. He has also contributed to The New York Review of Books , The New Yorker and Vanity Fair . In 1993 Richardson was elected to the British Academy and in 1995 he held the position of Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford . In 2014 he lived in a 460 square meter apartment in Manhattan on the seventh floor of Broadway- corner of 15th Street.

Picasso biography

The Picasso biography was to appear first in one volume, then in two; eventually he decided to make four volumes out of it. The first appeared in 1991 and received the Whitbread Award ; it spans 25 years from Picasso's birth to 1906. The second volume was published in November 1996 and describes the ten years from 1907 to 1916, the birth of Cubism, the third was published in 2007 and describes the next 16 years until 1932, when Picasso just turned 50 was.

He is currently working on the fourth volume, which should cover the rest of his life up to 1973 and thus 41 years. In this work he is assisted by Marilyn McCully; Because of his old age and his increasing visual difficulties, he was looking for a colleague or two for the last volume and found in Gijs van Hensbergen an author who has made a name for himself through a special study of Picasso's legendary picture Guernica .

Compared to the Picasso biography of Roland Penrose , whom Richardson describes as a loyal friend and which appeared during Picasso's lifetime, which is why Penrose portrayed him without a shadow, Richardson wanted to openly discuss the sides of his life and personality, about which Picasso had always kept quiet . In particular, he wanted to work out the paradoxical side of Picasso's personality and his work. He relied on Picasso's repeated assertion that his work was like a diary.

Cooper biography

In 1999, 15 years after Douglas Cooper's death, he published his biography ( The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper ), widely praised and described by Andrew Anthony as "wonderfully disrespectful", which is subtitled and rightly called Picasso Stretch also refers to this, as well as a collection of earlier published, less academic, sometimes embarrassingly revealing essays ( Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters ) in 2001, which were received with mixed feelings.

This work primarily served to finance the Picasso biography, which more than ate up all the income from the first two volumes, which were selling well, mainly because of the cost of the image rights. Richardson complained in particular about the "cutthroat" claims of Picasso's heirs and the "particularly greedy" claims of Russian museums. In the end, he was forced to sell a large part of Picasso's personal gifts and to contact friends who set up a foundation to finance further work ( John Richardson Fund for Picasso Research ).

curator

In 2009 he curated an exhibition at New York's Gagosian Gallery from Picasso's late work entitled Mosqueteros ; he simply answered in the negative to the question of corruption through switching between commerce and academic work. The following year, Richardson curated Picasso - The Mediterranean Years (1945–1962) , June 4 - August 28, 2010 for the London Gagosian Gallery .

Publications

  • Pablo Picasso: watercolors and gouaches. German Book Association, Berlin 1956.
  • Edouard Manet: paintings and drawings. Phaidon Verlag, Cologne 1959.
  • Juan Gris. Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund 1965.
  • with Dorothy M. Kosinski: Douglas Cooper and the Masters of Cubism. Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel 1987, ISBN 978-3-7204-0052-7 .
  • with Marilyn McCully: A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881-1906 (Vol. 1). Random House, New York 1991, ISBN 978-0-375-71149-7 .
  • with Marilyn McCully: Picasso, Leben und Werk, in 4 vol., Hld, vol. 1, 1881–1906. Kindler, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-463-40159-2 .
  • with Marilyn McCully: A Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel, 1907-1916 (Vol. 1). Random House, New York 1996, ISBN 978-0-375-71150-3 .
  • with Marilyn McCully: Picasso, Leben und Werk, in 4 vol., Hld, vol. 2, 1907-1917. Kindler, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-463-40143-6 .
  • The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper . 1999, ISBN 0-226-71245-1 .
  • Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters: Beaton, Capote, Dalí, Picasso, Freud, Warhol, and More. Random House, New York 2001, ISBN 978-0-679-42490-1 .
  • John Richardson, Marilyn McCully: A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Vol. 3). Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-307-26665-1 .
  • with Brenda Richardson: Warhol from the Sonnabend Collection . Rizzoli, 2009, ISBN 0-8478-3277-5 .
  • with Memory Holloway, Dakin Hart, Jeff Koons, Helene Parmelin: Picasso Mosqueteros: The Late Works 1962–1972 . 2009, ISBN 978-0-8478-3299-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Brook Mason: Picasso biographer John Richardson dies, aged 95. In: The Art Newspaper. March 12, 2019, accessed March 13, 2019 .
  2. ^ The Sorcerer's Apprentice. ISBN 0-226-71245-1 , p. 4.
  3. ^ The Sorcerer's Apprentice. P. 9
  4. ^ The Sorcerer's Apprentice. P. 11
    Charlotte Higgins: Demons and beefcake - the other side of Francis Bacon. In: The Guardian . November 22, 2009, accessed August 13, 2010 . Charlotte Higgins: Sado-masochism and stolen shoe polish: Bacon's legacy revisited: Art historian John Richardson's revelations on the troubled artist he knew as a young man. In: The Guardian. November 22, 2009, accessed August 13, 2010 .
  5. ^ The Sorcerer's Apprentice. P. 14.
  6. ^ Charlie Rose : A rebroadcast of a conversation with John Richardson. (Video) In: Current Affairs. July 26, 2000, archived from the original on April 13, 2009 ; accessed on March 13, 2019 (English).
  7. ^ The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Pp. 9/10
  8. ^ The Sorcerer's Apprentice. P. 15.
  9. ^ The Sorcerer's Apprentice. P. 87ff.
  10. ^ John Richardson: The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper. Pp. 23-24
  11. ↑ a b Charlotte Higgins: Picasso nearly risked his reputation for Franco exhibition: Had he accepted it would have been major coup for Falangists and destroyed Picasso's status as hero of left, says biographer. In: The Guardian. May 28, 2010, accessed August 13, 2010 .
  12. ↑ a b c d e David Grosz: The AI ​​Interview: John Richardson. In: Blouin Artinfo. May 29, 2008, p. 1 , accessed on August 13, 2010 (English).
  13. ↑ a b c d David Grosz: The AI ​​Interview: John Richardson. In: Blouin Artinfo. May 29, 2008, p. 2 , accessed on August 13, 2010 .
  14. ↑ a b John Richardson. In: randomhouse.ca . Archived from the original on August 21, 2012 ; accessed on March 13, 2019 (English).
  15. ^ The Sorcerer's Apprentice. P. 297.
  16. ↑ John Richardson. In: The New York Review of Books . Retrieved August 13, 2010 .
  17. ^ Search Results: John Richardson. In: The New Yorker . Retrieved August 13, 2010 .
  18. ↑ John Richardson. In: Vanity Fair. Retrieved August 13, 2010 .
  19. ↑ Downtown Abbey. In: Welt am Sonntag . May 18, 2014, page 58.
  20. ↑ Michiko Kakutani : More on the Career of the Genius Who Boldly Compared Himself to God. In: The New York Times . November 6, 2007, accessed March 13, 2019 . Patricia Zohn: Culture Zohn: John Richardson's Definitive Picasso Biography Shows How to Get it Done. In: The Huffington Post . November 9, 2007, accessed August 19, 2010 .
  21. ↑ a b Andrew Anthony: Master chronicler of a flawed genius. In: The Observer . October 7, 2007, accessed August 13, 2010 .
  22. ^ Pablo Picasso - New Discoveries with Gijs van Hensbergen. In: Dillington House. 2009, archived from the original on January 21, 2013 ; accessed on March 13, 2019 (English).
  23. ^ Gijs van Hensbergen: Guernica: Biography of a picture. Siedler Verlag, Munich, 2007, ISBN 978-3-88680-866-3 .
  24. ^ Roland Penrose: Portrait of Picasso. Museum of Modern Art, New York 1971, ISBN 978-0-87070-536-6
  25. ↑ Michael Peppiatt: Trompe l'Oeil. John Richardson's memoir revisits his years with Douglas Cooper in the south of France. In: The New York Times. December 12, 1999, accessed August 24, 2010 .
  26. ^ Peter Conrad: Privates on parade. In: The Observer . December 16, 2001, accessed on August 24, 2010 (English): "John Richardson takes a sadistic pleasure in divulging the intimate lives of the modernists in Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters" Alfred Hickling: Rogue's gallery. In: The Guardian. December 1, 2001, accessed on August 24, 2010 (English): "Alfred Hickling enjoys a grand tour of modern art's masters and madmen in John Richardson's eye-opening Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters"
  27. ↑ Andrew Anthony: Master chronicler of a flawed genius. In: The Observer . October 7, 2007, accessed on August 13, 2010 (English): "Picasso's family demanded 'extortionate' permission costs, Richardson complained, while 'Russian museums were particularly greedy'" "
  28. ↑ 'Picasso Mosqueteros'; Adria and Andrés. In: CharlieRose.com. March 30, 2009. Retrieved August 29, 2019 . Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (1945–1962) - June 4 - August 28, 2010. In: Gagosian Gallery. February 19, 2009, archived from the original on June 2, 2010 ; accessed on August 13, 2010 . Carol Vogel: A Personal Lesson in Late-Period Picasso. In: The New York Times. March 25, 2009, accessed August 13, 2010 .
  29. ↑ Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (1945–1962) - June 4 - August 28, 2010. In: Gagosian Gallery. February 19, 2009, archived from the original on June 2, 2010 ; accessed on August 13, 2010 . Jonathan Jones: Picasso shows a softer face in London. In: The Guardian. Retrieved on August 13, 2010 (English): "The artist's later statues and ceramics, on show at the Gagosian gallery's Mediterranean Years, reveal a tender family man" A reminder of what all the fuss is about. In: The Economist . August 11, 2010, accessed August 19, 2010 .
personal data
SURNAME Richardson, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British art historian and art critic
DATE OF BIRTH February 6, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH March 12, 2019
Place of death New York City