BOOKS

By ROBERT HUGHES

A LIFE OF PICASSO, VOL. I by John Richardson

Random House; 560 pages; $39.95

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was the most fertile artist of the 20th century, and immense quantities of ink have been spilt over his work. He was, you might say without too much exaggeration, both the last hero of Romantic culture and the first of the age of publicity: a prodigy of talent on permanent display in an age of mass media. No other artist, not even Michelangelo, had been famous in quite this way before.

Because his public career lasted most of the 20th century, Picasso has been seen through many distorting filters. The latest is the complacent feminist critique that seeks to jettison the idea of the "great artist" and to flatten his work into stereotypes of patriarchy and misogyny. But where is the book that gives us the actual man?

Over the years Picasso has been the subject of much penetrating scholarship, but also of too much guff. There have been hundreds of books about Picasso, but no really satisfactory biography until now. Those written in English tended to be useful but overadoring, like the 1958 life by his close friend Roland Penrose; or deplorably ignorant, like Picasso: Creator and Destroyer (1988), by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington. To draw Picasso whole, in full context, is a daunting task; but now that the first of John Richardson's four volumes is out, one sees that it could indeed be done.

This is probably the last serious biography of Picasso that will be written by anyone who knew him well. Richardson, now 67, first met the artist when he was living in France in the early 1950s; their rapport lasted 10 years, and the young English art critic kept ample notes. With the assistance of art historian Marilyn McCully (whose speciality is turn-of-the-century Barcelona, where Picasso's talent was incubated), Richardson has mined a large seam of material. He was, for instance, the first biographer allowed to consult Picasso's own archives. He knows the work intimately, and is skilled at teasing out its recurrent strands of imagery -- those pointers to Picasso's deepest impulses -- across a long span of time.

The result is a life story in the classic mold. The idea that an artist's work can be approached through the events of his life is disparaged by some academic critics. Certainly one learns little about some artists -- Braque, for instance, or even Matisse -- from the tenor of their day-to-day lives. But with Picasso, who viewed his art as a diary, the life is the best key to the work. And the work is suffused with the man's traits: his extreme machismo, his predatory eye (the Andalusian mirada fuerte, or gaze of power, which, as Richardson rightly argues, was one of Picasso's fetishes), his belief in the magic power of images, his emotional cannibalism, his charisma and sardonic wit. Richardson shows how these developed in the young Picasso while debunking such legends as the notion that he drew like a child prodigy, a visual Mozart.

The narrative frame is short. It brings Picasso from childhood through the Blue and Rose periods, stopping in 1907 just as the 25-year-old artist was souping himself up (under the influence of El Greco) to produce what would turn out to be the emblematic radical painting of the century, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Richardson is a born storyteller, with a vivid sense of detail and character that enables him to deal with the large cast of players entangled in Picasso's early life, from obscure Catalan artists, shady French art dealers and questing Russian collectors to writers like Alfred Jarry, Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire and that redoubtable, droning narcissist, the Miss Piggy of the American expatriate avant-garde, Gertrude Stein.

Richardson's account of such figures has to be the most readable description of the avant-garde milieu of 1900s Paris since Roger Shattuck's classic work, The Banquet Years. But they are not there as mere background; their impact on Picasso, their role in the formation of his ideas and imagery, is carefully assessed. One sees, for instance, what Picasso's work got from his "odd couple" friendship with his diametric opposite, the mercurial, spiritually obsessed Jewish homosexual Jacob: it was the vein of mystical imagery, the fascination with arcana, the tarot and the figure of the artist as Hermes Trismegistus, that pervades the Blue Period and culminates in his first masterpiece, La Vie, 1903. Likewise, Richardson is very shrewd about Picasso's relations with Stein, pointing out how her egotism was so resistant to his that she became one of his early real-life icons: her bulky presence, Richardson speculates, fused with childhood memories of his mother, led to the unnaturally massive torsos of his postwar classical nudes.

Richardson explores areas left untouched by earlier writers. Picasso and his girlfriend Fernande Olivier, for example, spent a good deal of their time between 1904 and 1908 high on opium, but the relevance of this to the empty- eyed, dreaming waif figures of the Rose Period had gone unnoted before. He does much to clear up the vexed question of Picasso's politics, pointing out -- contrary to recent theses on the subject -- that the anarchist ideas loose in the air of Barcelona had next to no provable effect on his work, and that as a young artist he was timorously apolitical. The figures of his Blue Period -- especially the consumptive-looking girls whose traits he got from visits to the Saint-Lazare prison for "fallen women" in Paris -- were not meant as symbols of social inequality; they have much more to do with Picasso's relish for victims.

All along the way, Richardson gives a richly informed and lucid account of the dynamics of Picasso's growth, neither sparing his failures nor losing sight of his quintessential Spanishness. The story pulls like a locomotive and can only gather more energy in volumes to come. If its promise is sustained, Richardson will be to Picasso what Richard Ellmann has been to Joyce, or Richard Holmes to Coleridge.