A Life of Picasso, Volume IV: The Minotaur Years, 1933-1943 by John Richardson
Jonathan Cape, £35, 368 pages
John Richardson died in 2019 with his monumental biography of Picasso half-finished, leaving its subject with 30 years of life still to come. This uncompleted project will surely be the Ozymandias of all biographies, since Richardson’s talents were uniquely matched to his protean subject. In his youth, he lived for 10 years in Provence with the rebarbative Douglas Cooper, the great collector of Cubism; Picasso was a neighbour and frequent visitor.
