Pablo Ruiz Picasso's life is probably the most dissected in the history of art. Mistresses, critics, followers, dealers—all have weighed in.
Now art historian Richardson has written the first of a planned four-volume biography. And a strong beginning it is, meticulously tracing Picasso's first 25 years—1881-1906, just before he began the revolutionary Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Richardson, writing with style and energy, demystifies many Picasso legends. Contrary to previous accounts, for instance, Richardson's analysis of Picasso's early work shows he was not a child genius. Another tale spun by Picasso is that Don José, his artist father, handed over his brushes to his son—never to paint again—as his eyesight began to fail. It's a marvelously symbolic story that did not happen. Richardson suggests the tale is most revealing for what it tells about the son: "Pablo's love for his father evidently had a patricidal tinge to it."
Richardson skillfully reconstructs the artist's early life in Spain, though inevitably the narrative picks up in 1904, when Picasso leaves Spain to settle in France. Richardson's description of the poverty that shadowed the early years in Paris is harrowing.
He vividly brings to life avant-garde Paris, drawing telling portraits of such people as Gertrude Stein and Matisse. Equally absorbing is Picasso's triumphant 1906 return to Spain, with perfume-drenched mistress Fernande Olivier on his arm.
In the competitive arena of Picasso scholarship, Richardson has unique credentials. During the 1950s, while living in the south of France, he took notes on his frequent visits with Picasso. He was also present with Picasso, who supplied a running commentary, when the vast contents of the artist's Paris studio were shipped to Cannes. France. After Picasso's death, Richardson was the first biographer allowed access to the archives at the Picasso Museum in Paris.
The wily Picasso used to tell his biographers, "My work is like a diary." But it was hardly an open one, consisting of codes and hidden messages. In this book, containing some 900 illustrations and documented by 1,069 footnotes, a master at dissimulation meets his match as Richardson examines the artist's extraordinary life and vast oeuvre with the eye of a Sherlock Holmes. If this brilliant start is any indication, lovers of modern art and lovers of just plain fascinating character studies are in for a very enlightening, exciting, four-volume trip. (Random House, $39.95)
by Fabienne Marsh
The heroine-narrator of this sylphlike, winningly punctilious novel is Meredith Saunders, an 18-year-old Connecticut girl whose leukemia has been in remission for nearly five years.
Her illness is not mere incident. The experience of having been near death—of having to confront life's consequences at much too young an age—have sobered her, made her more appreciative of nuance and detail. So she can say, with more authority than most teenagers could, "When I start thinking about all the slender likelihoods from which things grow, I feel how possible it is for everything to slip away, and loss creeps over me like a long shadow."
The plot revolves around a visit by her two older sisters, Lenore, separated from an alcoholic husband, and Maria, the subject of a rabid courting ritual by a married man, and her dotty-as-a-fox 86-year-old grandmother, Grace. That the married man is also the stepfather of Meredith's best friend—a boy she may or may not be inclined to fall in love with—provides enough complications to satisfy any soap-opera fans who stray into the novel.
In a couple of sequences the book verges on a tacky kind of coming-of-age fiction. Meredith describes her first sexual experience this way: "He was kissing my mouth, my eyes, my forehead, and coaxing all sorts of mystery spots until the core to my reactor was on the verge of a meltdown."
At other moments, Meredith's level of maturity seems excessive—in a Holden Caulfield sort of way. She says, for instance, "For most people religion is the discipline they would otherwise not have—a church mural in which the eyes always seem to be following them."
Marsh, however, writes so gracefully and has such an acute (if inwardly spiraling) sense of humor she makes Meredith's extremes of behavior, from mere girlishness to worldly wisdom, seem plausible.
A free-lance documentary filmmaker, Marsh is more straightforward in this book than she was in her first novel, 1988's Long Distances, which consisted entirely of letters and postcards. Her innovation here is in the book's tone—somehow solemn and playful at the same time—and in the way she treats her characters with respect and affection, but not excessive respect and affection. (Algonquin, $17.95)
by Bruce Nussbaum
This book's subtitle, How Big Business and the Medical Establishment Are Corrupting the Fight Against AIDS, both clarifies and over-simplifies the points it makes.
Yes, this is a meticulously researched chronicle of what the federal government, its drug-developing agencies and the big pharmaceutical companies have done (and not done) to find anti-AIDS drugs, but it is also much more. Clearly the work of a seasoned reporter (Nussbaum is a senior writer at Business Week), Good Intentions develops characters, plots and subplots as carefully and with as much detail as the best novel. Nussbaum's book is at least as much about the power plays, arrogance, fear and greed that motivate its players as about the details of AIDS research itself.
Any in-depth study of the decade-long epidemic will necessarily overlap with other books on the subject, notably Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On. Yet while Nussbaum occasionally uses the same sources and explores the same topics, his focus is more clearly on such people as Dr. David Barry, the "puppet master" of the giant drug company Burroughs Wellcome, producer of the only approved anti-AIDS virus drug, AZT; Sam Broder, the zealous scientist who, Nussbaum says, colluded with Burroughs Wellcome to "wrap his career around AZT"; and Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, one of the first community physicians to experiment with AIDS treatments.
The resulting drama of how these and other AIDS activists have interacted provides fascinating glimpses into the big business that is medicine in this country.
There are flaws in Good Intentions. Some passages about drugs are too technical; the bureaucratic twists and turns can be difficult to follow. Occasionally the chronology gets confusing. But for those who wonder why the billions spent by the finest scientists have yielded only one "mediocre" AIDS drug in 10 years—and for anyone concerned with the way bureaucracies can impede the very processes they're supposed to facilitate—Good Intentions is a must read. (Atlantic Monthly, $22.95)
by John Grisham
Mitchell McDeere, third in his class at Harvard Law, hadn't planned to sign with an obscure 41-attorney firm in Memphis. But when the offer arrives—$80,000 the first year, plus bonuses; a low-interest mortgage; two country-club memberships; and a new BMW ("You pick the color, of course," assures a senior partner)—poor boy Mitch, owing $23,000 in student loans, can't resist.
Soon he and wife Abby are sampling all the designer suits, fine wines and important furnishings those billable hours can buy. And for Mitch, there are lots of billable hours—80 to 100 a week—as he plunges into his first demanding days at Bendini, Lambert & Locke. Then two associates mysteriously die, and the FBI is at his side.
An agent says McDeere's office, house and probably his car are bugged because his firm exists to launder mob money; the partners protest that, after so many successful tax dodges, they are being harassed by the government. Mitch, the fly in the middle of this intricate legal web, sees danger no matter which spider he trusts.
The Firm is a thriller of the first order, powered to pulse-racing perfection by the realism of its malevolent barristers. (Grisham is a criminal-defense attorney in Mississippi.) Film rights have already been snapped up, and it may one day provide the most blessedly bloodless fright flick since Hollywood turned to Technicolor. (Doubleday, $19.95)
>Answers to the title question of So What Makes You Tick? by David Sharpe (Ten Speed, paper, $8.95): "Heavens! I've no idea."
—Katharine Hepburn
- Contributors:
- Harriet Shapiro,
- Ralph Novak,
- Sara Nelson,
- Susan Toepfer.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
