A Life of Picasso

"My work is like a diary," Picasso once told John Richardson. "To understand it, you have to see how it mirrors my life." Richardson, who lived near the artist in Provence for ten years and became a trusted friend, was able to observe and record this phenomenon at first hand. This first volume or Richardon's study takes Picasso to the age of twenty-five. It reveals how the adolescent Picasso struggled, through determination and study, to escape the shadow of his father's artistic failures. It describes his precocious success in Barcelona and Paris and the period of rejection and despair that followed. We watch Picasso transform the prostitutes of the Saint-Lazare prison into Blue period madonnas and, later, the performers of the Montmarte circus into Rose period harlequins. Volume I culminates in Picasso's dawning perception of himself as the messiah of the modern movement. Some nine hundred illustrations enable the reader to follow Picasso's mesmerizing development in images as well as words. -- From publisher's description