I have literally just got done reading O'Brian's Picasso, and I have to say I have found a great book! Not just good, fine, well-written, excellent, brilliant, bravo and adios -- it's all that; but it's great, too. Not so many of those around. I did think as I was reading it that this made O'Brian to biography what Tuchman was to history... taking events from the records, not just hearsay or what someone else wrote, by itself; unafraid to say the plain truth, when the truth was plain; aiming at neither praise nor blame, but clearly full of liking and admiration, without any kind of truckling, worship, or excuse-making, and similarly full of profound respect for the work, the work, the work, that Picasso continued to turn out almost without interruption until almost literally the day he died, some years past 90 (he was born in 1881).
So many biographies, especially of artists, somehow miss the point, the reader feels at the end. After all the stories of love marriage children births deaths bad luck and good luck, friendships made and friendships broken, you quite often feel as though you've had a lot of detail without any real picture of the person -- many leaves without a glimpse of the tree. That is emphatically not the case here. O'Brian is well-acquainted with research using primary documents, interviews and secondary documents, and the problems of sifting evidence and coming to what conclusions one can, and when one can't, saying so in clear terms. Also, while O'Brian knew Picasso slightly (his own term), since O'Brian lived in the Rousillon for so many years, and Picasso spent his summers in various places in the Midi, in no way is this a buddy book or anything like it.
One of the nice things about the book is that, only as far as is justified, O'Brian lets you know as major events happened in the world, if there was or was suspected to be an influence on Picasso's art. Picasso lived in Paris during the Occupation of WWII -- he was in his sixties and the Spain that had originally issued his passport was long gone behind the Spanish Civil War, so he was effectively a stateless alien, quite an unsafe thing to be anywhere let alone in occupied territory in wartime. He didn't truckle, a difficult position to maintain under those threatening and ugly circumstances, and many records and accounts of his life at this time provide evidence for this, not just some boastful statement after the fact. The anecdotes of what happened to him and what he did during the war as various Germans from troops sent to 'search' (even at times when troops had just searched and knew there was nothing to find) up to a visit from the German ambassador himself are recounted in the book, and I won't spoil them here (but a hint: Guernica was still in his Paris studio at the time).
Hardcover copies of the original 1976 edition titled Pablo Ruiz Picasso are available occasionally, and only on the used book market, while a fine paperback edition titled simply Picasso and with a new preface by the author (the only textual difference from the original edition) was brought out some time after 1989 and itself reissued by HarperCollins in 2003.
10:54:26 AM 
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