Painting Picasso

Biography: A Life of Picasso: Volume III The Triumphant Years 1917-1932 By John Richardson (with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully) Jonathan Cape, 592pp. £30John Richardson is the author of a book on Georges Braque.

Published in 1959, as part of the Penguin Modern Painters series, it is an exemplary and detailed piece of work, although, with a text extending to just 29 pages, it gives little indication of the magnum opus about Braque's pal Picasso on which Richardson would embark somewhat later in his life. The third volume of his biography of Picasso, subtitled The Triumphant Years, takes the story from 1917 to 1932 and extends to 592 closely printed pages. Add that to the 1,000 or so pages already accounted for in the first two volumes and it is clear that Richardson is building a monument on a Proustian scale: À la recherche du Picasso perdu, perhaps.

And in a sense we didn't know Picasso was lost until Richardson found him. Even given the voluminous literature already in existence about its subject, A Life of Picasso is unprecedentedly detailed, drawing on a wealth of archival and first-hand sources. Richardson evokes not just one person but several distinct milieux in all their complexity. He would not dream of mentioning someone without giving us their back-story, usually succinctly, often opinionatedly.

He has a huge cast of characters to deal with and he manages it brilliantly. None of which clogs up the proceedings. Irrelevances are omitted and research is worn lightly, so that the sentences swim along as smoothly as swans, the intellectual legwork invisible beneath the surface. Proust himself comes briefly into focus. Observing him at a prestigious New Year's Eve party where he "spoke only to dukes", Picasso commented approvingly: "Look at him, he's on the job."

AS VOLUME III begins, Picasso, having agreed to design a production, Parade, for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, sets off to Rome with Diaghilev, Jean Cocteau and Léonide Massine. Although the ballet's composer was Erik Satie, he was, in Cocteau's phrase "a bottle that should not be shaken", so he stayed at home working. But Igor Stravinsky went along and he and Picasso became good friends. Both were poised to embark on their neoclassical phases, rediscovering and reinvigorating the work of illustrious precursors. And in time both were attacked for deserting Modernism. Schoenberg dubbed Stravinsky "little Modernsky! . . . Quite the Papa Bach!" An omnivorous observer, Picasso absorbed a great deal in Rome and Naples. Back in Paris, Poussin and Corot also became important points of reference, while Ingres was already a long-established influence, one so often commented upon that Picasso became exasperated: "As if Ingres was the only artist I ever looked at in the Louvre."

Leaving Paris was strategic in that the Cubist movement had become internally fractious and externally controversial. Picasso had no interest in the debate. He had already left Cubism behind, and he was happy enough to let others fight the battle. This was fundamental to his character: he always moved on to the next project and never wasted time defending what was already done. He moved at such a pace that there was no point in anyone trying to pin him down as a Cubist or anything else. The Surrealists and the Dadaists wooed him as a potential recruit, but he remained elusive. This is not to say that he rejected Cubism or Surrealism. On the contrary, he assimilated whatever interested him and felt free to employ whatever aspects of them suited his purpose.

WHILE IN ITALY he fell in love with one of Diaghilev's dancers, Olga Khokhlova, whom he eventually married, embarking on what Max Jacob scathingly termed his "époque des duchesses". Back in Paris, with a swish new dealer, he moved to a much posher address and discarded old bohemian friends in favour of rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous. Well, up to a point. In a 1919 photograph of himself and Olga in London, he looks a bit like a child wearing his father's suit, and by 1925, with that decade in full swing, he was driven to pinning a sign on the door of his studio at rue la Boétie reading: Je ne suis pas un gentleman. Or so he said. Richardson couldn't find anyone who actually remembered it.

It's as if Olga represented a kind of respectability and validation that he craved but that, once he had it, quickly became stifling. So he found another passion, in Marie-Thérèse Walter, whom he met outside Galeries Lafayette one evening at the beginning of January 1927. She was only 17½ at the time but: "For the next nine years or so, she would be Picasso's greatest love." Four years after Picasso's death in 1973, she killed herself. In paint, Olga's wan ill health, seen as increasingly sinister by the superstitious Picasso, is contrasted with the voluptuous Marie-Thérèse. Her advent unleashed a tide of overtly sexual and often phallic imagery in his painting and sculpture.

Richardson quite plausibly reads the work as inextricably interwoven with and driven by the artist's personal life. At the same time, he is well aware that, particularly from 1918 to the mid-1920s or so, Picasso turned out a series of dazzling masterpieces, drawings, paintings and sculptures, that evidence no particular connection with the evolving emotional dramas. These include the linear portrait drawings, such paintings as Two Nudes, the 1918 Still Life, Three Women at the Spring, Two Women Running on the Beach, Studio with Plaster Head and Three Musicians (possibly a self-portrait with Apollinaire and Max Jacob).

It's reasonable to ask whether Picasso merits this level of sustained attention. There are many people, including artists, who continue to regard him as a fraud. No small part of the virtue of Richardson's book is that it is assiduously work-orientated, providing detailed accounts of the genesis of virtually every significant piece, and demonstrating, for those who want to know, Picasso's incredible level of industry and inventiveness. Of course, not everything he did was great or even good, and he was consumed by his own myth as Jonah was swallowed by the whale. But discard the mythology, the cult of celebrity, and Jonah the artist re-emerges. Any reasoned appraisal would have to conclude that those who dismiss Picasso as a charlatan are so far wide of the mark they are not even wrong. They'd be much better off opening their minds to one of the greatest bodies of work produced by any artist, ever.

Aidan Dunne is the art critic of The Irish Times