Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters: Beaton, Capote, Dalí, Picasso, Freud, Warhol, and More

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Summary: Mr. Richardson Goes Duck Hunting
Review: Having read the first two volumes of Mr. Richardson's "A Life Of Picasso," and having thoroughly enjoyed them, I went into this book with high expectations. Overall, I was disappointed. Granted, the book is a collection of some of the articles that Mr. Richardson has written for popular magazines over the past 30 years or so. The audience for, say, a "Vanity Fair" article is not the same as the audience for a scholarly journal. But Mr. Richardson acknowledges in the preface that he had hundreds of articles to choose from. He states that he made a conscious decision not to include his more academic essays. That is a shame. Because some of the material that is included, about such people as Lucien Freud and Brice Marden, for example, gives a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been. Here is Lucien Freud on why he chooses to paint nudes of, almost exclusively, close friends and relatives: "Aesthetic and biological truth-telling is what my painting is all about.....the fact that a model would never find himself or herself in this particular situation were it not at the painter's behest makes for vulnerability.....vulnerability would not be an issue if I used professional models. But I don't, because professional models have been stared at so much that they have grown another skin. When they take their clothes off, they are not naked; their skin has become another garment." I would like to have seen more keen insights into the artistic process, such as this one, and less of the following (this is from the essay on Salvador Dali and his wife Gala): "One of my responsibilities (as vice president of the firm that acted as Dali's dealer) was keeping the artist to the terms of his contract- a one-man show of new work, every two years. This was no easy task, given that his eye was so bleary and his hand so shaky that assistants had taken over most of his work. I could not help feeling sorry for the seedy old conjurer with his rhinoceros-horn wand, leopard-skin overcoat, and designer whiskers, not to speak of his surreal breath." For the most part, you can't see any reason to dredge these essays up and put them into book form. There is a lot of gossip, particularly about peoples' sex lives (The Dalis, Vita Sackville-West, Peggy Guggenheim, etc.) and there are several pieces where Mr. Richardson takes on subjects that are just too easy to ridicule, such as Dr. Barnes, The Sitwells and Armand Hammer. (Hence, the title of my review.) Since Mr. Richardson states that he and his assistants had to do a lot of work to update these essays, there is really no excuse for some of the blatant errors- such as writing (in the essay on the Merchant/Ivory movie "Surviving Picasso"- where Richardson is trying to make the point that moviemakers have done a poor job of portraying major artists) that Anthony Quinn played van Gogh. (He did not. In "Lust For Life" Kirk Douglas played van Gogh and Quinn played Paul Gauguin.) In another piece, the statement is made that the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize is made in Norway. That's wrong. It is made in Stockholm, Sweden. In the essay on Pablito Picasso, Pablo's grandson, Mr. Richardson writes that it took seven years to settle the Picasso estate. As Picasso died in 1973, this would bring us to 1980. But the essay informs us that the estate was divided up in 1990. This may seem as though I am nitpicking. But, remember, Mr. Richardson is working on the third volume of his Picasso biography. The first two volumes have been rightly hailed as a tremendous achievement. The cheap shots and silly errors contained in "Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters" are beneath a scholar of Mr. Richardson's ability. I still give this book three-stars, as even though the collection is uneven, there are several good essays. Besides the pieces on Lucien Freud and Brice Marden, which I mentioned earlier, there are thoughtful articles on Klee, Miro and Braque, for example. On the whole, however, one gets the impression that Mr. Richardson's publisher wanted something from him while they were waiting for the third volume of "A Life Of Picasso." There's nothing wrong with that. It's just that a little more care should have been taken in deciding what that something was going to be.

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Summary: A mix of essays on artists, writers and tycoons
Review: Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters provides a mix of essays on artists, writers and tycoons, each illustrated with a photo or piece of art and selected by the author because they are about special people he's known. While non-artists are included, this is reviewed here for its focus on many of the fine artists Richardson has encountered, from Dali and Warhol to Marden and Picasso. Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters is an intriguing collection of images and insights.