John Richardson, critic and Picasso biographer, dies at 95

Sir John Richardson, the eminent historian and critic whose multivolume series on Pablo Picasso drew upon his personal and aesthetic affinity for the Spanish painter and was widely praised as a work of art in its own right, has died. He was 95.

Nicholas Latimer, a vice president and senior director of publicity at Alfred A. Knopf, said Richardson died Tuesday morning at his Manhattan home.

The London-born Richardson's first Picasso book, "A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881-1906" came out in 1991, and was followed by editions covering 1907-1916 and 1917-1932.

Latimer said that Richardson had been well into a fourth volume, in the works for over a decade. But he did not immediately know the title, what years it would cover or when it would be published.

Art lovers had looked forward to Richardson's Picasso writings the way readers of politics have anticipated Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson series.

Like Leon Edel's five-volume epic on Henry James and Richard Ellmann's "James Joyce," Richardson's books were regarded as biographies of the highest literary quality, graced by knowledge, poetry, passion and insight.

Richardson's criticism and scholarship brought him a Whitbread Award in 1991, election to the British Academy two years later and a knighthood in 2012.

Reviewing Richardson's third Picasso volume, in 2007, The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani cited Richardson's "intimate understanding of the artist's temperament and endlessly inventive styles, his expansive vocabulary of myths and motifs and, most important, the mysterious nature of the alchemy by which he transformed his own experiences and emotions into art."
"He was like a human cannibal in that way. We'd all be suffering from nervous exhaustion at the end of the day from his intensity and he would have all this energy he seemed to get from us. At the age of 85, he'd go sailing off into studio and work all night long."
But when John was just 5, his father died and his mother sent him to a boarding school so "horrendous" that Richardson once "was left dangling by the wrists from a hook in the ceiling, my shrieks disregarded by those in authority."
Mercifully, by age 13 he was attending the humane Stowe public school, which featured a progressive art program that Richardson credited with "triggering an obsession with Picasso."