Picasso's cubist followers were horrified that their avant-garde hero should desert them for anything as frivolous and modish as the Ballets Russes, but he ignored their complaints. Sets, costumes, and rehearsals were to be done in Rome, where Diaghilev had his wartime headquarters. However, Picasso's Chilean protector and patron, Eugenia Errázuriz, had persuaded Diaghilev to agree, provided Picasso did the décor, Erik Satie the score, and Léonide Massine the choreography. The meddlesome Polish hostess Misia Sert had tried to scupper the project.

Cocteau had desperately wanted Diaghilev to stage this ballet in Paris. In a vain attempt to set himself at the head of the avant-garde, this ambitious young poet had inveigled Picasso into collaborating with him on Parade: a gimmicky, quasi-modernist ballet about the efforts of a couple of shills to lure the public into their vaudeville theater by tantalizing them with samples of their acts.

Instead of Irène, Jean Cocteau accompanied him. Picasso's visit to Rome in February 1917 had originally been conceived as a wedding trip, but at the last moment his on-again off-again mistress, Irène Lagut, who had promised to marry him, changed her mind, as her predecessor, Gaby Lespinasse, had done the year before. All rights reserved.:Ĭhapter 1: Rome and the Ballets Russes (1917) Currently he divides his time between Connecticut and New York City, where is working on the fourth volume of A Life of Picasso Excerpt. In 1994-95 he served as the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford. In 1993 Richardson was made a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. The second volume of A Life of Picasso, covering the years 1907-1917, was published in 1996. The first volume of A Life of Picasso, covering the years 1881-1906, was published in 1991 and won the Whitbread Prize. He has published books on Manet and Braque and is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. In the early 1960s Richardson moved to New York, where he was appointed head of Christie's US operation, and eventually became a full-time writer and editor.

In 1949 he moved to France, where he lived for the next twelve years, befriending Picasso, Braque, Leger, and Cocteau. He studied art at the Slade School but soon gave up painting for art criticism. John Richardson was born in London in 1924.

A life of picasso volume 4