Just as there is no shortage of Picasso exhibitions this year to mark the 50th anniversary of his death, there is no dearth of literature about the 20th century’s most celebrated artist. But which books about him are really worth your time? Here are eight essential texts.
Life with Picasso, by Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake
Artist Françoise Gilot, who died this past June at 101, is famous for being the only Picasso “muse” to walk out on him. In 1964 she made a splash with her best-selling memoir (written with journalist Carlton Lake), in which she piercingly describes her decade-long relationship with Picasso. Gilot recounts beautiful and ugly aspects of their romance, fondly remembering Picasso’s advice about art-making and then unsparingly describing instances of abuse pages later. More than just a gossipy evocation of Picasso’s true psyche, her proto-feminist treatise unpacks how male genius is often built on female exploitation. Gilot reaches a conclusion that is just as striking today as it was then: “I realized, as I thought it over, that Pablo had never been able to stand the company of a woman for any sustained period.”
A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881–1906, by John Richardson
John Richardson’s four-volume biography of the artist runs more than 1,800 pages and was initially expected to be even longer: Richardson died in 2019, before he could write the planned fifth and final book. Initiated in 1991, the series is justly regarded as one of the best artist biographies ever for its attention to detail. Richardson tracks Picasso’s rise from milquetoast Spaniard to master Frenchman in the first book, which traces the artist’s early years and his Blue Period. Along the way, Richardson roots aspects of Picasso’s persona in the initial stages of his life, showing that his desire to be constantly surrounded by a vibrant circle of friends can be connected to the tradition of the tertulia in Spain. Meanwhile, Richardson also explores how Picasso’s promiscuous, bohemian lifestyle left a lasting mark on the artist.
A Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel, 1907–1916, by John Richardson
The second book in Richardson’s famed multivolume Picasso biography kicks off with the making of a truly great work, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and ends with the artist beginning his transition away from the mode he helped usher in with it. The focus of this book is primarily how Picasso, along with his friend Georges Braque, shaped and reshaped Cubism, a style that abstracts objects until they shatter into an array of planes, as though seen from many different angles at once. As Cubism found an audience, Picasso changed dramatically, leaving the squalor of Paris’s Montparnasse neighborhood for a more middle-class lifestyle.
A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932, by John Richardson
Richardson’s third book in his four-part Picasso biography is the one most focused on the artist’s social life, with much of its 500-plus pages given to digressions about figures like Olga Khokhlova, a ballet dancer who became the artist’s wife, and Jean Cocteau, a poet whose attempts to infiltrate the French avant-garde were not always successful. That Richardson spills so much ink about them and many others is a testament to how wide Picasso’s network had grown during this era, his “classical” one, as it is often called, because its subject matter and style evoked the ancient art he saw in Italy. This so-called “return to order” gave way to turmoil at home, as he and Khokhlova began to start a family, even as he routinely cheated on her. As Richardson charts the chaos, he makes no excuses for Picasso’s misogyny.
A Life of Picasso IV: The Minotaur Years: 1933–1943, by John Richardson
The final A Life of Picasso volume is by far the shortest, perhaps because Richardson died ahead of its publication. It doesn’t bring us to the end of Picasso’s career, cutting off before the French government finally began to embrace him after years of surveillance and distrust, but it still serves as a fitting conclusion for an artist whose experimentalism resisted tidy interpretations. Picking up well after Picasso had begun to integrate the precepts of Surrealism into his work, this book guides its readers through the making of one of his most well-known works, 1937’s Guernica, made in response to the carnage of the Spanish Civil War, and also tracks how the artist’s manipulation and misogyny forced lovers like Olga Khokhlova, Dora Maar, and Marie-Thérèse Walter, whom Picasso began seeing when she was a teenager, to suffer. Unusually for Richardson, the women are sometimes sidelined—they are briskly tossed off in a terse epilogue, although Richardson does leave readers on a disturbing note, writing that Picasso’s art “tended to thrive on the dark side.”
Picasso, by Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein’s unconventional 1938 memoir is less a rehashing of her friendship with Picasso than it is a “story of his story,” as she labels it toward this short book’s end. Its looping structure surveys Picasso’s growth as an artist while also returning repeatedly to his beginnings, implicitly mimicking his desire to make everything old new again through modernism. As she charts his stylistic transitions—from Blue Period to Rose Period, Cubism to Surrealism—Stein notes that Picasso was faced with a constant drive to “empty himself” of anything preconceived.
Picasso the Foreigner: An Artist in France, 1900–1973, by Annie Cohen-Solal
Annie Cohen-Solal’s 2023 book chronicles Picasso’s strained relationship with France, which never formally recognized him as a citizen. As the historian writes, Picasso feared the French police from the time he arrived in Paris in 1900, and for good reason—they surveilled him for decades, according to archival documents she quotes at length. Their concern was Picasso’s flirtation with anarchism early on (despite the fact that he was labeled apolitical by his cohort). His outspoken Communism later triggered yet more concern, even as his work found fame in the country he long called home. Cohen-Solal’s reporting casts Picasso as an explicitly political subject, showing how his art became ensnared in a larger identity crisis facing France.
Picasso’s Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece, by Suzanne Preston Blier
In the intro to this 2019 book about a Picasso showstopper, Suzanne Preston Blier, a historian focused on African art, states that Les Demoiselles d’Avignon can’t be considered simply a painting of five female sex workers. Pointing out that African masks inspired Picasso’s depiction of these women, Blier writes that the work is “consistent with the larger colonial world that Picasso and his friends inhabited.”Her feminist analysis involves viewing the titular demoiselles as more than sex objects. She also explores what African art meant to white Europeans like Picasso, whose encounters with work from afar were often bound by the walls of museums that cared little for their holdings’ original context.
