John Richardson (Kunsthistoriker)
Vorlage:BLP unsourced John Richardson is a British art historian and Picasso biographer, born in London in 1924[1].
Life and work
John Patrick Richardson was born in London in 1924, the elder son of Sir Wodehouse Richardson, D.S.O., K.C.B., Quarter-Master General in the Boer War, and founder of London and the British Empire's Army & Navy StoresVorlage:Citation needed. He studied at the Slade School of Art and went on to work as an industrial designer before becoming an art and ballet critic for The New Statesman. In 1952 he moved to Provence, where he and Douglas Cooper, the British collector, bought the Château de Castille near Avignon and transformed it into a private museum of cubism. During the next ten years he lived in France and became a close friend of Picasso, as well as of Braque, Léger and de Staël. Besides writing books on Manet and BraqueVorlage:Citation needed, he embarked on an analytical study of Picasso’s portraits, now part of his four-volume biography, A Life of Picasso.
In 1960, Richardson moved to New York, where he organized a nine-gallery Picasso retrospective in 1962 and a Braque retrospective in 1964. Christie’s then appointed him to open their US office, which he ran for the next nine yearsVorlage:Citation needed. In 1973 he joined M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., as Vice President in charge of 19th- and 20th-century painting, and later became Managing Director of Artemis, a mutual fund specializing in works of art. In 1980 he decided to devote all his time to writing. Besides working on his Picasso biography, he has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. In 1993 he was elected to the British Academy and in 1995 was appointed Slade Professor of Art at Oxford.
The first of four planned volumes of Richardson's A Life of Picasso biography was published in 1991, winning a Whitbread Award. The second volume was published in November 1996, followed by the third in 2007. The final volume has not yet been published.
In 1999 he published a memoir, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and in 2001 a collection of essays, Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters. The author is currently working on the fourth volume of his Picasso biography. In 2009 the Gagosian Gallery held an exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s late works entitled Mosqueteros which was curated by John Richardson.
Richardson divides his time between a loft in New York City and a country house in ConnecticutVorlage:Citation needed.
Publications
- John Richardson: A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881-1906. Knopf, 1991, ISBN 978-0-375-71149-7.
- John Richardson: The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper. University Of Chicago Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0-226-71245-1.
- John Richardson, Brenda Richardson: Warhol from the Sonnabend Collection. Rizzoli, 2009, ISBN 0-8478-3277-5.
Arts organizations supported
International Foundation for Art Research
American Friends of the Royal Academy
Advisory Committee to the Metropolitan Museum's Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts