A Life of Picasso, The Triumphant Years, Signed to Kenneth Jay Lane
[Signed to Kenneth Jay Lane] Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso, The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932. First Edition. 2007. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition. This book is from the library of Kenneth Jay Lane. It is inscribed to him on the title page, “For my beloved friend Kenny, with all the author’s love, John.”
This third installment of John Richardson’s biography of Pablo Picasso is as extraordinary as all the reviews say. In approximately five-hundred-pages, it covers Picasso from the end of youth (age thirty-four) to the doldrums of middle age (fifty-one). It is intellectual but unpretentious—Richardson is as adept at covering the social undercurrents as he is the artistic ones. There is also much humor, as the book attempts to explain the contradictions in the life of the 20th Century’s greatest artist. John Richardson and Kenneth Jay Lane, to whom this copy belonged, were in the same New York circle, sharing a diverse group of friends that ran the gamut from Andy Warhol to Brooke Astor.
“Picasso loved [his wife Olga] as a proud Spanish husband would, which was radically different from the way he loved his mistress.”
--John Richardson