Richardson on Picasso

Art historian John Richardson will be in Seattle on Wednesday December 8 to speak about Pablo Picasso with scholar Gijs van Hensbergen.

Richardson was Born in London in 1924 and was already a renowned critic and curator by 1952 when he moved to Provence to create a museum of cubist art. Picasso and his wife at the time, Jacqueline Roque, were neighbors and frequent visitors, as were Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, and other vitally important 20th century artists. Picasso and Richardson became friends during these years, and Richardson made a point of carefully studying the painter's life and his work.

Upon moving to the United States in 1960, Richardson organized a major retrospective of Picasso's work that was held simultaneously at nine New York galleries. Beginning in 1980 he devoted himself full time to writing the definitive study of Picasso’s life. His phenomenal A Life of Picasso now fills three volumes, soon to be four. The final volume, currently being written by Richardson with assistance from van Hensbergen, covers Picasso’s last forty years.

In addition to his work on Picasso, Richardson has written art criticism and history for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. In 1993 he was made a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy; in 1995-96 he served as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University.

Richardson speaks with van Hensbergen at Benaroya Hall on December 8 at 7:30 PM. More information and tickets available right here.