Volume I culminates in Picasso’s dawning perception of himself as the messiah of the modern movement. We watch Picasso transform the prostitutes of the Saint-Lazare prison into Blue period madonnas and, later, the performers of the Montmartre circuses into Rose period harlequins. It describes his precocious success in Barcelona and Paris and the period of rejection and despair that followed. It reveals how the adolescent Picasso struggled, through determination and study, to escape the shadow of his father’s artistic failures. This first volume of Richardson’s prodigiously detailed and documented four-volume study takes Picasso to the age of twenty-five. The author’s evocation of Picasso’s ferocious ego, demonic loves and hates and black fears is the more absorbing for its terse and lively prose and freedom from jargon. Richardson’s eye is finely attuned to the complexities of Picasso’s art, and his extensive knowledge of cultural history enables him to show how Picasso plundered the art of the past, the imaginations of his poet friends, the beliefs of mystics and magi, to create a revolutionary new synthesis.

At last we are able to see how his courage and terror misogyny and tenderness, generosity and thrift, superstition and skepticism, cynicism and sentiment, are reflected in the conflicts and paradoxes in his work. The artist’s ambivalence is one of the author’s central themes. Richardson is the first biographer to make sense of the myriad contradictions that leave so many statements about Picasso’s nature equally true in reverse. This close personal friendship and the privilege of working in hitherto inaccessible archives make Richardson uniquely qualified to write the artist’s life, rescuing his renown from sensationalist legend and specialist pleading and analyzing anew the traumas and obsessions that triggered his explosive genius. Later, Picasso’s widow continued to give Richardson access to the artist’s studios and storerooms. “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. “My work is like a diary,” Picasso once told John Richardson. You can read this before A Life of Picasso, Volume I: 1881-1906 PDF full Download at the bottom.

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