Richardson had admired Picasso's work since he was a teenager, when he failed to convince his mother to lend him $250 so he could buy "Minotauromachy" (a black and white print later sold for $1.5 million). Reviewing Richardson's third Picasso volume, in 2007, The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani cited Richardson's "intimate understanding of the artist's temperament and endlessly inventive styles, his expansive vocabulary of myths and motifs and, most important, the mysterious nature of the alchemy by which he transformed his own experiences and emotions into art." Richardson's criticism and scholarship brought him a Whitbread Award in 1991, election to the British Academy two years later and a knighthood in 2012.
Like Leon Edel's five-volume epic on Henry James and Richard Ellmann's "James Joyce," Richardson's Picasso books were regarded as biographies of the highest literary quality, graced by knowledge, poetry, passion and insight. A fourth volume had been in the works for several years and a date for the final volume has not been set. The London-born Richardson's first Picasso book, "A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881-1906" came out in 1991, and was followed by editions covering 32. Knopf, said Richardson died Tuesday morning at his Manhattan home. Nicholas Latimer, a vice-president and senior director of publicity at Alfred A. NEW YORK - Sir John Richardson, the eminent historian and critic whose multivolume series on Pablo Picasso drew upon his personal and esthetic affinity for the Spanish artist and was widely praised as a work of art in its own right, has died.
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