Shock! Horror! Plot in Crisis!

John Richardson was interviewed on Front Row this week. For the past 30 years he has been writing the biography of Picasso. This month years 1917 - 1932 are published. Richardson still has 41 years to go. Picasso died in 1973. Richardson is 84.


Richardson’s final words of the interview were, “I’m beginning to see to some extent how his mind works.”


After 30 years! I should hope so.


What would life be without an obsession?


I know mine too well.


I went to Picasso’s house once in Antibes. I say house but in was a chateau in the true castle sense of the word. I remember being truly amazed by the work on display there - sketch after sketch after sketch, rooms of them. My father was living in Antibes then. He had been working on the beach until threatened by the local heavies and wound up as a grill chef at a little bar facing the beach.


In a strange conjunction of resonances this week I bought the Edith Grossman translation of Don Quixote. The cover is sand-coloured and in the bottom right-hand corner is a pen and ink drawing of a knight on a horse. It is fabulous. Looking on the back I found the drawing is by Picasso. Don Quixote was just about my father’s favourite book. Of course though, he read it in Spanish.


My only other meeting with Picasso was in New Orleans. I was practically penniless, hot, killing time and I nipped into gallery, lulled by the air conditioning. I picked up the brochure on offer there and was skimming through it when swooped upon by an all-toothed American.


“You are looking for something in particular, sir?” she said.


I narrowed my eyes. “My mother, she collects art.” In fact, just the previous year we had cut out some Gaugain pictures from a book we had stolen from the local Oxfam and slipped them into clip-frames. They looked grand on the walls of our council house.


“Well, we have some Picassos in the back. Would you like to view them?”


“Ok,” I said.


What I remember most of the viewing is my footwear. I was wearing the shoes I always wore that year, espadrilles. The upper was cotton and I could see quite clearly my big toe sticking through.


Picasso, no doubt, would have approved.


(For those of you who think this is all too High Art let me set the scene. It is Saturday night. I am on my fourth beer. I have watched x factor, both the contest and then the results. Because of x factor I went onto YouTube and watched the Beatles performing ‘The Long and Winding Road’ (Leon had sung it on x factor), then I went to Amazon and decided I wanted The White Album and Rubber Soul, then I went to iTunes and looked at Michael Bublé (Leon apparently sounds like him), then I went back to YouTube and watched a clip from the movie ‘Help!’)


‘Help!’ was my favourite film as a child. Me and my brother would watch it over and over. They showed it on tv just after John Lennon was shot and killed in New York. That was in 1981 and I was 10 then.


On that day mum and dad came to collect me from school. I knew something was up. They never came to school to collect me.


“John Lennon’s dead,” my dad said.


“Bang bang,” my mum said. She’s a bit of a comedian my mum.


“Who’s John Lennon?” I asked but when we got home it was all over the news.


“He just seemed to be getting back on his feet,” my mum said. “Had his haircut.”


We watched ‘Help!’ I remember feeling sad. I think it was the first time I had ever cared about anything.

***



Coda: When I have an idea what that particular week’s blog is going to be about I write it on a piece of paper next to the computer (a Mac!) This week I had no idea. That is until I was in the shower at the gym this afternoon. John Richardson, I thought. Picasso, I thought.


I was so caught up in my ideas I was totally lost. In the middle of this I looked down at myself and saw that I was naked.


“Fuck!” I thought and jumped. “You’re naked!”


Then I remembered. I was in the shower.


“Drew,” I said. “It’s ok. You’re in the shower.”


Enough.


I’m dull.

Currently reading - Don Quixote, Cervantes


Currently listening to - Sowewhere in London, Marillion