not the least being the original sketch for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The rapport would last the artist’s lifetime. No one could have been better placed than John to chronicle Picasso’s art and age. More than 60 years on, Richardson’s posthumous fourth and final volume on the maestro’s life has been published. Though I hardly expected to find a corresponding account of that evening in Arles, I did somehow hope this magisterial work would bring Picasso into the years he became, for most of us now, the supremely significant (pace Warhol) artist of our times. But no; regrettably it goes up only to 1944. Picasso lived for another three decades, during which he produced so much of his controversial work. It is our loss that Richardson elected to exclude these latter years when his subject’s most audacious bravura – and their friendship – was at its apogee. The decade – from 1933 – covered by this superbly illustrated book is dense with vignettes of abstruse academics and the worldly intellectual gossip in which Richardson has always revelled. But it reveals his subject to be oddly parochial. Picasso never went to America, the Far East or Russia, preferring an unvaried beat between Paris, the Riviera, Barcelona and the Biarritz villa of his earliest patron, the Chilean heiress Eugenia Errázuriz. These seasonal cycles read, dare one say, somewhat repetitively – despite Picasso’s monstrous ego, his callous treatment of those he loved or, rather, those who loved him and his indifference to the political situation. At the outbreak of war, hot-footing it back to Paris, he stored his paintings in secure vaults: his banker was otherwise unable to guarantee his finances. Remaining there throughout the Occupation, he consorted with those who, if not out-and-out collaborators, were figures the Nazis turned a blind eye to. Among them, astonishingly, was Hitler’s favourite sculptor, Arno Breker. Having commandeered Helena Rubinstein’s palatial apartment, Breker was brazenly melting down Paris’s metal monuments, casting his own musclebound Volkshelden to replace them. Picasso’s unflagging work routine, the rows with dealers and friends, and the slightly scary, clowning humour of his company are manifest. But it all seems somehow dimensionless; there’s little colour and texture to clothe the god of paint. While the author’s sources are legion,
‘Hi, I’m de-cluttering’
there is, most strangely, absolutely no reference to a revealing essay on the artist written by Janet Flanner in precisely the period this book covers. As the New Yorker’s correspondent in Paris, she describes Picasso’s ‘wild little right eye like a Spanish bull’s, and a kinder, larger, more human, left’ and his being ‘racially and constitutionally tragic-minded, sad, sarcastic, with malice in speech taking the place of wit’. Still, after dickering with and eventually abandoning an offer of director at the Prado, post-Guernica Picasso sent the Spanish government large sums to buy planes. After defeat, he sent equally large sums for refugees huddled across Spain’s border with France. And Flanner includes a note of his more poignant persona. This monstre sacré owned, at various times, kittens, a Mexican hairless puppy, a white mouse he kept in a drawer and a dachshund named Lump. Dominguín dedicated his first bull to Senorita Bosè, his last to Picasso. After the final, fatal sword blow, the matador offered him the bloodied, black ears. He stood, the spectators roared, and the gore-glossed beast was dragged out. The trumpets blared, the lights dimmed. The golden stones faded to grey monoliths under a violet oval of sky. With that last broad gesture over this scene of gore and glory, bravery and beauty, cruelty and compassion, Picasso’s core – and his coeur – were gone, his aura lingering on the falling night. It was time for a cognac on the terrace.
Mother’s ruin NICHOLAS LEZARD Young Mungo By Douglas Stuart Picador £16.99 Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize in 2020 for Shuggie Bain, the story of a boy, the youngest of three children,
living in a Glasgow tenement with an alcoholic mother. That novel recalled events in the 1980s, but had a framing device set in 1992: which is roughly where we are with Young Mungo. Mungo is the youngest of three siblings living with an alcoholic mother. Mungo is not Shuggie: and his mother is not Shuggie’s mother, who dies in Shuggie Bain. This is not explicitly Douglas Stuart’s story, but he knows what he’s writing about: the hard, precarious life of the housing schemes, a world of endless sectarian violence and varying degrees of hopelessness; the kind of place where it is bad enough to be gay, as Mungo discovers himself to be; much worse if the boy you fall in love with is a Catholic. This, you think to yourself, is not going to end well. Well, it does, in a way, but only after some quite spectacularly explosive violence which, after a long build-up, is enough to jangle the nerves of the stoutest reader. It starts uneasily enough, with Mungo going on a fishing trip with two men who, it dawns on you, are not to be trusted: ex-inmates from Barlinnie, Glasgow’s big jail, alcoholics, and … well, let’s not be getting ahead of ourselves. The novel is the story of how he ended up on this weekend fishing trip, and what happened there. I hope I do not make the novel sound too grim. It is grim – there’s no getting around that – but it also has its moments of humour, even if it’s just the recorded banter of the youngsters, particularly Jodie, Mungo’s sister. She is able to see through everyone and lets them know she can – up to a point. She talks of the Modern Studies teacher, Mr Gillespie, who ‘sees it as his wee project to stir up the proleytariat in the East End while he drives his Sierra estate to the Marks and Spencer out at Bishopbriggs and spunks his wages on baguettes and Merlot… I saw him peeling a kiwi fruit in the staffroom the other week.’ Jodie seems, in a way, too good to be true: very much the voice of harsh reason that, in a household like hers, doesn’t go down well. And, when we learn what Mr Gillespie has been doing to her, we realise that, yes, she is too good to be true. Her brother Hamish is a hooligan, which is too polite a word for what he gets up to; there is a psychopathy to him that made me think of Begbie, the nutter in Trainspotting. But Hamish’s circumstances – a father at 18, with the mother 15, and with absolutely no prospects in a city that is dying all around them – has at least some kind of The Oldie Spring 2022 53
