The artist as a middle-aged man

It’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves at the outset, as we reach the third volume of John Richardson’s stupendous biography of Picasso, exactly where we are. Picasso died in April 1973, aged 91, and it comes as something of a shock to realise that at the end of this volume, in 1932, he’s a middle-aged man entering his fifties: yet he had another 40 years to go. Is it this that daunts us when we try to weigh up the man and his work — his longevity, his century-straddling superhuman productivity? When we think of the kind of artist he was, or even the kind of genius he was, Archilochus’s old adage comes to mind — particularly useful when we come face to face with prodigious gifts: ‘The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Picasso is a fox-category genius, like Mozart, like Leonardo, like Shakespeare, as opposed to the hedgehog-category (Matisse, Brahms, Proust).