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

Richardson, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525658734 ISBN 13: 9780525658733

Publisher: Knopf, 2019

Synopsis

John Richardson's riveting memoir about growing up in England and, at twenty-five, beginning his twelve-year adventure with the controversial art collector Douglas Cooper.

With a new introduction by Jed Perl, here is John Richardson's richly entertaining memoir of his life with the brilliant but difficult British art expert Douglas Cooper--a fiendish, colorful, Evelyn Waugh-like figure who single-handedly assembled the world's most important private collection of Cubist paintings. John Richardson tells the story of their ill-fated but comical association, which began in London in 1949 when Richardson was twenty-five and moved onto the Château de Castille, the famous colonnaded folly in Provence that they restored and filled with masterpieces by Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Juan Gris. Richardson unfurls a fascinating adventure through twelve years, encompassing famous artists and writers, collectors and other celebrities--Francis Bacon, Jean Cocteau, Luis Miguel Dominguín, Dora Maar, Peggy Guggenheim, and Henri Matisse, to name only a few. And central to the book is Richardson's close friendship with Picasso, which coincided with the emergence of the artist's new mistress, Jacqueline Roque, and gave Richardson an inside view of the repercussions she would have on Picasso's life and work.

With an eye for detail, an ear for scandal, and a sparkling narrative style, Richardson has written a unique, fast-paced saga of modernism behind the scenes.

About this title

About the Author:

JOHN RICHARDSON is the author of A Life of Picasso (3 volumes; the first volume won the 1991 Whitbread Book of the Year Award), Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters, and books on Edouard Manet and Georges Braque. Richardson was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth in 2012. He died in March 2019.

JED PERL is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His previous books include Magicians and Charlatans, Antoine's Alphabet, and New Art City, which was a New York Times Notable Book and an Atlantic Book of the Year. He lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Army and Navy Child

My earliest, indeed happiest, memories are bound up with the Army and Navy Stores -- not a shop selling surplus camouflage gear but a once celebrated London department store, which my father had helped to found and continued, as vice chairman, to run very efficiently until his death. As a four-year-old, I longed for Thursdays to come round. My father would return from his weekly board meeting with the toy department's finest electric train or toy motorcar or, best of all, a building set -- anything to gratify the son and heir he was so proud of having produced at the age of seventy. I also enjoyed going to the imposing Victoria Street store, where my father had set up the best food halls and wine and cigar departments of any store in London and, much to my delight, a zoo department, where I got to play with the monkeys. The staff treated me like a little prince and hung a framed photograph of me in one of the elevators. Even my mother turned out to have an Army and Navy provenance. Not that she was very forthcoming about it; however, she filled me in on my father's role in the great enterprise she always referred to as "the Stores."

My father had been the youngest of a group of twelve subalterns who had pooled their resources and, around 1870, formed a cooperative society for the wholesale purchase of provisions for their mess as well as for their personal requirements. Yorkshire hams and jars of Stilton, cases of claret and port and Madeira (for elevenses with the requisite slice of seed cake) would follow my father to Africa in the 1870s and 1880s, where he battled Ashantis and Kaffirs and Zulus and helped his friend Kitchener defeat the Khalifa at Omdurman. In the South African War, he became Quartermaster-General and was popular with the troops for a revolutionary innovation, refrigerated meat. After being decorated by Queen Victoria and knighted by Edward VII, he retired and devoted his logistical skills to transforming the cooperative society of his youth into a phenomenally successful department store. At its height -- between 1890 and 1940 -- the Army and Navy Stores was more than a mere emporium: it was a key cog in the machinery of the Empire.

Besides the flagship store in London, which supplied the British establishment with everything it could possibly want, the Stores had outlets in the principal army and navy bases Aldershot, Portsmouth, and Plymouth for the convenience of people in the services. But the two greatest jewels in the Stores' crown were the enormous branches in Calcutta and Bombay, which functioned as travel agents, bankers, caterers, undertakers, and insurance brokers, as well as purveyors of the pith helmets, thunder-boxes, plum puddings, and all the other myriad things listed in the Army and Navy's catalogue, which ran to more than a thousand pages. This catalogue was the bible of the British Raj. Kipling's Mrs. Vansuythen and Mrs. Hauksbee would have been unable to function without it. The loss of the Empire after World War II would eventually deprive the Army and Navy Stores of its imperial luster. Bomb damage made matters worse. To repair the building, the Stores employed a construction company that turned out to be a subsidiary of their principal rival, Harrods. This strategy allegedly enabled Harrods to take over the Stores and reduce it to the downmarket establishment it remains today.

When he was almost seventy, my dashing, surprisingly liberal father caused a stir by falling in love with one of the Stores' employees, an attractive thirty-five-year-old woman of much warmth and humor called Patty Crocker, whose job was to retouch photographic portraits. Thanks to her training as a miniaturist, she was able to whittle inches off the waists of stout matrons in court dress and add a lifelike sparkle to the expressions of loved ones lost in the recent war. Horrified at first by her boss's advances, the fetching retoucher soon capitulated and married the elderly though still seductive vice chairman in 1923. They were idyllically happy, especially when I was born to them in 1924. A daughter arrived the following year, and another son four years later. In July 1929, my father died of a stroke at the age of seventy-five, brought on, I suspect, by all this autumnal fathering. I was five at the time. His death hit me very hard -- all the harder because my mother told me that he had gone off to South Africa to visit old battlefields. Death would have been easier to accept than this fictitious desertion. Seventy years later, I still miss him. Unfortunately, my father had focused his organizational skills on the Stores rather than on his own fortunes. He had saved relatively little and allowed our once thriving family business -- a private bank that managed the finances of an ever diminishing number of Indian princes -- to fall into the hands of a racist relative. The sale of my father's large, ugly villa at the top of a hill near the Crystal Palace -- a perfect venue for one of Sherlock Holmes's cases -- generated enough money for my mother to buy a small house in South Kensington and educate us children, but not enough to give us much of a start in life.
Shortly after my father's death, my mother made another ill-advised but well-intentioned decision. She packed me off to a horrendous boarding school, for no better reason than that my cousin Maurice had been a pupil there twenty years before. Unbeknownst to my mother, Maurice -- a fervent left-wing journalist of anarchic wit --  had loathed the place and was in the process of writing a polemical attack on private education in the form of a roman à clef about it. And then, unbeknownst to me, the book was published, and I became the catalyst of the masters' indignation. Classes would be kept in "because of Richardson," and I would be left dangling by the wrists from a hook in the ceiling, my shrieks disregarded by those in authority. For an entire term I was "sent to Coventry," which meant that the other boys were not allowed to speak to me. Appeals to my loving, uncomprehending mother were met with injunctions to "be a little man -- cousin Maurice loved the place." Unable to stand the bullying any longer, I took advantage of what I had precociously perceived as my mother's weakest spot. I told her -- quite untruthfully -- that after her previous visit to the school, the headmaster's wife was overheard to say that Lady Richardson was not her idea of a lady. I was instantly removed to a more serious school, where, after ice-cold baths at dawn, pupils were given Latin dictionaries and expected to translate ten lines of Milton into hexameters and pentameters.
My family's anomalous circumstances were the more puzzling for being unmentionable. My father's formidable spinster sisters -- Aunts Ella, Alice, and Maude -- lived in a big house at Blackheath, a beautiful, unspoiled area of south London, where my grandfather (born in 1814) had owned land that is still called "Richardson's fields." They played a lot of croquet, said "ain't" and dropped their g's -- "we're goin' for a turn on the heath" -- like fashionable people a hundred years earlier. My mother's sisters, Auntie Louie and Auntie Vi, lived very differently in a snug little semi-detached house in depressing Streatham, where they treated us to scrumptious high teas of bread-and-dripping, bubble-and-squeak, and toad-in-the-hole in their funky kitchen. Why then did my mother and her sisters have such a stash of linen embroidered with coroneted R's? I was a nosy child and soon discovered that the R stood for Rosebery or Rothschild. I fantasized that I was illegitimate -- maybe Jewish. When asked about these things, my mother blushed. I was sixteen before she divulged the fact that my grandmother had been lady's maid to Hannah Rothschild, who had married Lord Rosebery. Was she light-fingered? I asked. No, the Roseberys had been open-handed: after Hannah Rosebery died, my grandmother had been allowed to take whatever mementos she wanted from her bedroom. Other members of my mother's family had been gamekeepers or butlers at Mentmore or one or other of the Rothschild estates in the Thames Valley. One of them had even claimed to have heard Lord Rosebery utter his famous after-dinner dismissal of his Rothschild relations, "Children of Israel, back to your tents!" Far from being dismayed by my mother's revelation, I was rather proud. To have worked for such exigent employers, my maternal relations must have been very good at whatever it was they did. Over the years my upstairs-downstairs background has proved, if anything, an advantage. I like to think it has enabled me to see things simultaneously from very different angles, like a cubist painter, and arrive at sharper, more ironical perceptions.

At thirteen I went to Stowe, the youngest and least traditional of England's public schools. The magnificence of the buildings -- Stowe is one of the largest and stateliest of English houses -- made up for the degradation endemic to all boys' schools of the period. Everyday exposure to Vanbrugh's and Adam's façades and Capability Brown's landscaping engendered a taste for eighteenth-century architecture, which developed into a passion and provided the following pages with a subplot. A special veneration for the grottoes and temples that dotted the park resulted from their being the scenes of my first sexual experiences. One of these escapades ended ignominiously. A friend and I were caught on a rug in a distant folly by the Hunt Club: the club's pack of hounds had mistakenly followed our scent. There was a lot of ribald ragging, but the urbane, supposedly gay headmaster, who must have heard about it, failed to take punitive action.

Stowe's greatest advantage, for me at least, was its progressive art school. This was run by an enterprising Canadian couple, Robin and Dodo Watt. I will always be grateful to them for introducing us to avant-garde art magazines like XXe Siècle, Verve, and Minotaure, which enabled me, from the age of thirteen to fifteen, to understand and keep up with what the masters of the School of Paris were doing. Besides triggering an obsession with Picasso, these magazines encouraged me to dabble in modern art. The results were atrocious: dumb daubs embellished with seed packets, snapshots, and railway tickets. "Schwitters," I would murmur fatuously.

Back in London, I spent my pocket money on the latest Parisian publications at Zwemmer's wonderful bookshop on the Charing Cross Road. Picasso's greatest print, Minotauromachie, had just appeared. It cost fifty pounds. In the hope that my mother would advance the rest of my year's allowance, I reserved a copy. She not only refused to do so, she called up nice Mr. Zwemmer and told him she had a good mind to put the police onto him for trying to swindle little boys out of their pocket money. A signed copy of Minotauromachie recently fetched $1.5 million, the highest price ever paid for a print.

The outbreak of war in 1939 stranded me and my family on holiday at Dinard in Brittany. Tourists were panicking and forming mile-long queues for the ferry. My mother turned to me for help. Why not stay on in France and enjoy ourselves? I said, and then economize by settling in nearby Jersey (in those days the Channel Isles were famously inexpensive). A school for my sister was found in Saint Helier. Meanwhile I went in search of a tutor and ended up with the father of the painter Graham Sutherland, a railway official who had run away with a neighbor's wife and ended up, like many another black sheep, on this louche island. Besides studying with Mr. Sutherland, I had my first glimpse into the heady world of Proust, thanks to being taken up by a charming Parisian couple -- a handsome concert pianist, Prince George Chavchavadze, and his wife, the richissime Elizabeth de Breteuil, whose two daughters attended the same school as my sister. The Chavchavadzes regarded the Jersey manor house they had rented as a rustic wartime refuge. To me it seemed the epitome of luxe. In Paris after the war, I would go back for another taste of Chavchavadze life -- a great mistake.

My mother had been assured by the local governor's wife that the Germans would never invade Jersey. One night, however, the sky to the south turned orange as Saint-Malo went up in flames. Disregard the governor's wife, I told my mother, and rent a truck so that we can get our belongings -- above all, my art books -- onto the Southampton boat. We were lucky. Subsequent boats restricted people to one small bag. The closest we came to danger was when a German plane on the way back from bombing Portsmouth treated us to a brief burst of machine-gun fire. We still had to go through customs.

To escape the bombing, my mother took my brother and sister off to a farm in the country. I stayed on by myself in London but eventually enrolled at the Slade School, a faculty of the University of London that had been "evacuated" for the duration of the war to Oxford. I was a month short of seventeen and thrilled to be an art student. It did not take me long to realize that I would never be much good -- better write about painting than actually do it. Fifty-three years later, I would take some pride in returning to Oxford for a year as Slade Professor of Art History, the first Slade student to do so.

Besides making friends with two art students, Geoffrey Bennison and James Bailey, whose lives would continue to be intricately involved in mine, I embarked on a romance with an attractive, fattish girl called Diana, who fulfilled my adolescent dream of pneumatic bliss. We thought we were madly in love with each other; in fact we were in love with love. Diana like to fantasize. One day we were Heathcliff and Catherine; next day Rodolfo and Mimi; we were never ourselves. While staying with her parents in the depths of Devonshire, we announced we were going to get married. Her charming, sensible father took the matter lightly, but her socially ambitious mother was horrified; and so, with the help of Diana's ancient aunt, we decided to elope. It was ever so romantic -- trysts on Dartmoor at midnight -- but it was also a disaster. We were too young and too poor and too silly even to think of marriage. There was a further problem: Diana's Catholicism. She insisted that I convert to her faith, which I was only too happy to do. Unfortunately, she also insisted on remaining a virgin. In the face of her inflexibility on this point, I had an unsatisfactory fling on the side with another girl and then opted for the inevitable alternative. When she realized the situation, Diana returned to her family. In the hope of better luck next time, her mother packed her off to a fashionable quack to be slimmed down. In no time she became a living skeleton, and then glandular problems developed, and she died a year or two later.

Meanwhile I had been called up. As the son of a distinguished soldier, I felt obliged to apply for a commission in a "good regiment." The Irish Guards accepted me, but a week later I was struck down by rheumatic fever and invalidated out of the army before I even had time to put on a uniform. I felt guilty. I also felt relieved; the regiment would suffer appalling casualties in the Italian campaign. I spent the rest of the war in London with my mother and two siblings. During the day I worked as a...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0525658734
• ISBN 13: 9780525658733
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336