The catalog to an international art sensation – a once in a lifetime event of Picasso’s most prolific creative period – show opening at the Gagosian Gallery in London, June 2010. This volume features 3 single and 4 double gatefold illustrations and includes a detachable 23-page booklet of Picasso’s pencil and ink drawings.
During the decade after the end of World War II Picasso began to spend more and more time in the Cote d’Azur where he began drawing on the Mediterranean sources that had inspired him in earlier years. Picasso’s return to the south marked a return to a family life as well – which in turn inspired him in the studio. In the 1950s his sculpture work evolved and he expanded into ceramics, lithography, printing and graphic design techniques. This latest Picasso exhibition from the Gagosian Gallery features a more private side to these prolific years – a dazzling coming together paintings, sculptures, prints and ceramics – many provided by of the pieces by Picasso’s grandson, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso and curated by Mr. Ruiz-Picasso and Picasso’s acclaimed biographer, Sir John Richardson.
This is certain to garner as much press attention as Gagosian’s “must see” Picasso Mosqueteros exhibition in 2009.
Sir John Patrick Richardson, KBE, was a British art historian and Picasso biographer. The elder son of Sir Wodehouse Richardson, he was sent to board at two successive schools after his father's death in 1929. When he was thirteen he became a boarder at Stowe school, where he admired the architecture and landscape and was taught something about the work of Picasso and other innovative painters. After bring invalided out of the army in the Second World War, he worked in London as an industrial designer and became friends with the painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.
In 1949 Richardson met the art historian and collector Douglas Cooper and the two began a relationship that would last ten years. In 1952, he moved with Cooper to Provence, where he met a number of artists, including Pablo Picasso. In 1960, Richardson left Cooper and moved to New York, where he worked in the art world until retiring in 1980 to concentrate full time on writing. The first volume of his biography of Picasso was published in 1991, with subsequent volumes published in 1996 and 2007. In 2012, Richardson was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) for his services to art.
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.