A Picasso Primer: 9 Books on the Artist and His Complicated Legacy 

Taking a cue from the intro above, I’m going to go with Picasso: Women in His Life, An Homage (Hirmer, 2023) by Markus Müller with Marilyn McCully. It launches with his mother, Maria, who lived to the age of 84, and wraps up with Jacqueline Roque, his second wife, the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova being his first. At least two of his partners penned books of their own, notably Fernande Olivier, known as “La Belle Fernande” in Montmartre, and Françoise Gilot. More on Gilot’s books later.

The best known of Picasso’s biographers is undoubtedly John Richardson, who practically made a career of writing about the artist, and who was also a friend, the two having first met when the author was in his early 20s. A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy: 1881–1906 (Random House, 1991; Knopf reprint, 2007) is the first of the four-volume series telling Picasso’s life story—and my favorite of the four. (The others are subtitled The Cubist Rebel: 1907–1916, The Triumphant Years: 1917–1932 and The Minotaur Years: 1933–1943.) This particular volume covers Picasso’s formative years and into the Blue and Rose periods, when things were starting to break for him. There was talk of a fifth book, but Richardson sadly passed away before that could happen.

And how can we ignore Françoise Gilot, who, with co-author Carlton Lake, gave us Life With Picasso (McGraw-Hill, 1964; NYRB Classics reprint, 2019). Gilot was just 21 years old when she met Picasso in 1943; he was in his early 60s. Their breakup had the usual fallout. “There are all those people who showered me with attentions when I was with Pablo, but who look the other way when our paths cross now,” she wrote. Also a painter, she later partnered with another memorable individual, vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk, and lived to be a rousing 101. Looks like she had the last laugh, as she was recently shown at the Musée Picasso-Paris. Oh, and her book sold a million copies.

For those with a fondness for both Picasso and friendly rival Henri Matisse, Gilot also gave us Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art (Doubleday, 1990), in which she expounds on Pablo’s moods, noting that “life was a permanent roller coaster.” There’s a can’t-miss chapter for Matisse lovers, called Carving in Pure Color, in which she describes the artist at work on one of his cutouts, which he presented to the author. Picasso received one, too. Maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but there’s a Matisse self-portrait on page 80 that sure looks like Homer Simpson.

More recently, Hugh Eakin’s Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America, (Crown, 2022) tells of how Picasso came to feature widely in America’s galleries and museums despite initial qualms. As one reviewer noted, “Picasso’s triumph was very far from inevitable.” Without that acceptance, it’s likely that many of his memorable works would have been lost to the Nazis. The Museum of Modern Art got the ball rolling in late 1939, presenting “Picasso: Forty Years of His Art,” as New York City began to supplant Paris as the center of the art world. Guernica was among the featured works.

I’ve already gone long, but I have to mention books by noted authors Norman Mailer and Patrick O’Brian. Mailer gave us Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man (Knopf, 1995; Grand Central Publishing reprint, 1996), while O’Brian wrote Picasso: A Biography (Collins, 1976; W. W. Norton & Company reprint, 1994), which was lauded by art historian Kenneth Clark. And here are two last picks: the profusely illustrated Picasso in Paris: 1900–1907 (Vendome Press, 2011), by Marilyn McCully, and Billy Kluver’s A Day with Picasso: Twenty-Four Photographs by Jean Cocteau (MIT Press, 1999).