A cruel and vengeful god

The third volume of John Richardson's landmark biography of Picasso shows how the artist's misogyny caused huge pain - and fuelled some of his finest work, says Hilary Spurling
A Life of Picasso: Volume III The Triumphant Years 1917-1932 by John Richardson
Buy A Life of Picasso: Volume III The Triumphant Years 1917-1932 at the Guardian bookshop Public domain

A Life of Picasso, Vol III: The Triumphant Years 1917-1932
by John Richardson, with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully
Cape, £30, pp592

By far the biggest and most purposeful of very few surviving works by the infant Picasso shows a stocky, bearded Hercules. The figure clenches one fist and brandishes a small phallic club in the other. The drawing is dated 1890, when the artist was nine. John Richardson's latest biographical instalment starts nearly three decades later, with a trip to Italy where the adult Picasso once again confronted Hercules, this time a muscle-bound stone colossus in the national museum, whose superhuman size made up for Picasso's shortness, and whose head - 'bowed down by the sheer weight of his legendary power' - became a template for Picasso's serial engravings of himself.

What Richardson calls 'the eternal quest for gigantism' is the running theme of The Triumphant Years. The Farnese Hercules stands behind the massive sprawling sculptural figures that alternate on Picasso's canvases in the 1920s with their concise and cryptic Cubist counterparts. This was a classicism as competitive as his Cubism had been: 'Picasso pits himself against all the reclining nudes in history from antiquity onward, not just the Ariadnes and Artemises of the Hellenistic tradition but their progeny in works by Titian and Rubens, Ingres, Courbet and Renoir, as well as Matisse.'

The rapacity of Picasso's pillaging eye was matched by the velocity and precision of his responses, and by his phenomenal power of assimilation. He resaw, rethought and recreated the world by smash-and-grab, wrenching form apart, ripping out connections, redistributing body parts 'as if he were redesigning humanity'. Large stretches of this book read like a code-breaker's manual as Richardson expertly identifies 'testicular buttocks', vaginal mouths and eyes, penile necks, breasts, foreheads, even pump-action petrol pumps. Picasso drew his mistress again and again 'in the guise of his own engorged penis'. His aim was to stamp his image on everything in sight, and his ambition was not confined to seeing off human rivals. 'God is really another artist...' he said, 'like me.'

The flipside of Picasso's repeated claims to be both god and king was his perennial itch to thumb his nose at his admirers. He had gone to Italy in 1917 to design sets for Diaghilev's Russian ballet, and the first fruit of his new herculean sense of scale was a set of outsize circus blow-ups for Parade: a lumbering pantomime horse, a gimmicky American with skyscrapers sprouting from his shoulders, costumes that were fiendishly painful for the dancers to wear, and fell so flat with audiences, that Diaghilev took the ballet off after two performances. Picasso included himself on the drop curtain as a monkey in a laurel wreath.

The winged ballerina reaching up to pat the monkey was Olga Khokhlova, one of Diaghilev's rising stars and Picasso's future wife. Olga has been generally blamed for imposing alien bourgeois values on her husband (Picasso bought his first chateau under her management as well as a couple of apartments in the most expensive part of Paris), but Richardson's account suggests that something more like the opposite was true. Picasso needed a wife and, so long as she was chic, presentable and pliant, it hardly mattered who she was. Olga was a social and strategic asset for the paradoxical public persona Picasso constructed in these years, when shock tactics and guerrilla outrage made him the nearest equivalent to a Parisian George Bernard Shaw: part mage, part monkey, fawned on and feared by the society whose most basic assumptions he mocked or overturned.

Picasso with an immaculately svelte wife on his arm was an indefatigable socialite, always present on the sidelines of the innumerable mock battles staged by Parisians in this era of brawl and counter-brawl, pillow fights at fancy-dress balls, turbulent first nights, openings disrupted by Dadaist punch-ups and Surrealist reprisals. Politics passed Picasso by. So did the bleak realities of social and financial disintegration in postwar France. Even the final throes of the 1914-18 war seem to have impinged on him chiefly as a tiresome inconvenience that cut off supplies, detained friends at the front, and interfered with Diaghilev's ballet bookings ('German and Austrian troops had broken through the Italian lines, so Rome was out; the third battle of Ypres was going badly, so Paris was out...').

Picasso had his own private killing fields. In the initial stages of their marriage, Olga lost her family, her friends, her Ukrainian homeland and her native language to the Russian revolution. She had already lost her job, waking up one morning just before the wedding with a mysterious leg injury that put a stop for good to her dancing career. Some said Picasso hit her, but probably his brutality was moral rather than physical. The emotional core of this book is Richardson's detailed report, horrific and dispassionate, of repeated pictorial assaults as affection seeped out of Picasso's portraits of Olga to be replaced by rancour and rage.

Extreme vulnerability was the one thing in common between his wife and the 17-year-old mistress he picked up as an antidote in 1927. Marie-Therese Walter was the illegitimate child of an absent father and a mother with no apparent objection to launching her underage daughter (18 was the legal age of consent in France) as a middle-aged man's sex toy. Picasso took Marie-Therese to toyshops, circuses, amusement parks, treating her 'as a kid sister or daughter with whom he was having a passionate incestuous affair'. For the next five years she filled in time at the cinema in winter, on the beach in summer, while waiting to service Picasso in studio or beach hut. The 'awe-inspiring Bather with Beach Ball' shows this infinitely compliant Lolita 'pumped ... so full of pneumatic bliss she looks ready to burst her yellow-and-mauve bathing suit'.

If the paintings were awesome, so was their price in human terms. Picasso devoured men as well as women, sucking them dry, making off with their energy, searching out their weakness 'to satisfy his cannibalistic appetite for other people's egos'. Regular boosters of 'slavish, homosexual adulation' kept him going. Fellow artists had no option but to put up with Picasso's predatory raids or follow the example of the Romanian Constantin Brancusi, who barricaded his studio ('He came from vampire country, and knew about such things').

Richardson presents Picasso as a magician, exorcist or shaman, interrogating 'the darkness of his Spanish spirit', whose chief component turns out to be 'the atavistic misogyny toward women that supposedly lurks in the psyche of every full-blooded Andalusian male'. What this seems to mean is that hatred of women fuelled many of Picasso's greatest works, including the increasingly scary images of his wife. He painted her shrieking, howling, stabbing Marie-Therese or writhing naked with sagging flesh and skull-like jaw in an armchair 'that wraps itself around her like a shroud'. Even a composed and radiant still life like The Ram's Head proves to be a fetish designed to protect the painter against 'Olga's demons which had been acting up earlier in the year'.

Mme Picasso's problems - hysteria, haemorrhaging, unspecified 'gynaecological crises' - are dismissed here as largely of her own making. 'Women's illnesses are women's fault,' the artist once said to his biographer. Olga's theme - 'a scrawny succubus, eyes sewn onto her cheeks like buttons, and a dagger-sharp tongue protruding from her gaping mouth' - recurs in elegant, exuberant, dazzlingly inventive variations that become in the end generic rather than specific. Picasso gave his wife's toothy grimace, or 'vagina-dentata mouth', to the central figure in his 1930 Crucifixion, a vindictive Virgin Mary identified by Richardson as a stand-in for the artist's mother ('might he have held his lack of height against her?').

Richardson sees the actual or symbolic cruelty inflicted on Picasso's women - the pain they suffered, the shame and guilt they inspired in him - as in essence a form of public service. 'Picasso felt it was his shamanistic duty to exorcise evil by fighting it with evil.' It was through the psychic squalor of his marriage that the artist confronted, perhaps more squarely and directly than any other, the 20th century's chaotic and destructive undertow of violence. Richardson's argument, cogent, witty and persuasive, backed up by prodigious research and sumptuous illustrations, makes this herculean biography increasingly harsh, tough and uncomfortable to read.

The man, his muses and his magic

Life Pablo Ruiz Picasso, born 25 October 1881 in Malaga, Spain; died 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France.

Relationships In 1904 began a long-term affair with Fernande Olivier, but left her for Eva Gouel. In 1918 he married ballerina Olga Khokhlova, with whom he had a son, Paulo. They remained married until her death in 1955, but separated after Picasso's affair with 17-year-old Marie-Therese Walter, the mother of his daughter Maya. A relationship with Dora Maar followed, then Francoise Gilot, with whom he had two more children, Claude and Paloma. In 1961 he married Jacqueline Roque, with whom he stayed until his death.

Art The main phases of his work are agreed to be his Blue Period, Rose Period, Analytic Cubism, Synthetic Cubism, Classicism and Surrealism. Many of his paintings count among the most expensive in the world. In 2006, Dora Maar au chat sold at Sotheby's New York for $95.2m (£48m). Two years before, Garcon a la pipe went for $104m (£52m).

He said 'When I was a child my mother said to me, "If you become a soldier you'll be a general. If you become a monk you'll be the Pope." Instead I became a painter and I wound up as Picasso.'

They said 'Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint.' - Francis Bacon
Francesca Segal