The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper - Hardcover

Richardson, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375400338 ISBN 13: 9780375400339

Publisher: Knopf, 1999

Synopsis

John Richardson brings the same dazzling narrative style to this memoir as he did to Volumes I and II of A Life of Picasso. Robert Hughes called the second volume "a masterpiece in the making, the most illuminating biography yet written on a twentieth-century visual artist and the only one that can sustain comparison with Painter on Proust, Ellman on Joyce, or Edel on Henry James"; he also praised Richardson's "crispness of writing" and "impressive eye for the offbeat or scandalous detail." All these qualities conspire to make The Sorcerer's Apprentice a brilliant and fascinating chronicle.

This book is a sharply etched portrait of Douglas Cooper, the colorful Evelyn Waugh-like figure who single-handedly assembled the world's most important private cubist collection. It is also the story of Cooper and Richardson's association, which began in 1949 and came to fruition -- and ultimately disaster -- at the Chateau de Castille, the eighteenth-century colonnaded folly in Provence that they restored and filled with masterpieces by Picasso, Braque, Leger, and Juan Gris. Besides these artists and the women in their lives, Jean Cocteau, W. H. Auden, Cyril Connolly, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Helena Rubenstein, Peggy Guggenheim, and Anthony Blunt are just some of the figures who, through Richardson's insightful prose, leap off the page to appear before us in an entirely new light. A major revelation of the book is its portrait of Picasso in private; Richardson's friendship with the artist coincided with a period of dramatic change in the artist's life. Not since Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas has anyone given so intimate a picture of leading modern artists and their circle at work and play, or with such insight and understanding.

The flawless style, highly tuned sensitivity, and incisive wit of The Sorcerer's Apprentice make it one of the most entertaining and captivating memoirs of one of the great periods of artistic activity in this century.

About this title

Review

Two quotations from Francis Bacon bookend this curious, exasperatedly affectionate memoir by John Richardson, distinguished art historian and 1991 Whitbread Award-winning biographer of Picasso: the prophetic "she'll try to lure you to bed, and then she'll turn on you. She always does," finds its uncanny conclusion in "Didn't I warn you she was a thoroughly treacherous woman?" The sorcerer (art collector Douglas Cooper) and his apprentice (Richardson) lived for 10 years in the grandiose "folly" Château de Castille in Provence, where they entertained a circle that included Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Angus Wilson, Tennessee Williams, and a range of other usual suspects from that period's artistic fraternity. When Richardson left Cooper for the lights of New York, Cooper, in the great tradition of spurned lovers, burned Richardson's remaining possessions, stole his paintings, denounced him to friends and employers, and even attempted to arrange his arrest by Interpol. Cooper was a duplicitous, sadistic bully (among his more outrageous acts was loudly booing the queen outside Westminster Abbey at her coronation). But his deep knowledge of art history and classical cubism and his pioneering collecting of the works of Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Gris were an essential counterpoint to the staid policy of the Tate Gallery and its director, Sir John Rothenstein, for whom he held a deteriorating scorn. Richardson's delight in reviewing this formative period reignites the fire in Cooper flaring nostrils and borrows some of its flame to stoke what is arguably an enriching addendum to his Picasso magnum opus, which, appropriately, bears a dedication to his old sorcerer. --David Vincent, Amazon.co.uk

From the Back Cover

Praise for John Richardson's A Life of Picasso

"As I read it, my education simply advanced by one great step. It is like being in a clock tower when one of the big cogwheels moves forward by one notch -- a great, simple, fundamental event."
-- James Fenton, Leonardo's Nephew: Essays on Art and Artists

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0375400338
• ISBN 13: 9780375400339
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 336