This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the beginning of a dauntingly ambitious project: the 1991 publication of John Richardson’s A Life of Picasso: Volume I, 1881–1906. The second volume, The Painter of Modern Life, 1907–1917, followed in 1996, with The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932 appearing in 2007. (The first two volumes, written in collaboration with the Picasso scholar Marilyn McCully, are subtitled The Prodigy and The Cubist Rebel in subsequent editions.) The long gaps between books were occasioned by Richardson’s having to write saleable memoirs of his remarkable career to finance A Life. Impressively researched and copiously illustrated with vintage photographs and images of works of art, the three volumes present a vivid portrait of the preternaturally gifted, mercurial, superstitious, bullfight-loving Spanish émigré whose name is synonymous with modern art. Starting with the particulars of his childhood in Málaga and his youth in Barcelona, the books marshal facts and demolish myths. We meet Picasso’s family and friends, his lovers, admirers, and enemies, his patrons and art dealers. We learn where and how he lived, and with whom. Richardson, who knew Picasso from the late 1940s on and, for many years, with his partner Douglas Cooper, was a neighbor and frequent visitor in the south of France, zeroes in on the complexities of the artist’s domestic arrangements. He dissects Picasso’s foibles, superstitions, and obsessions, and he is perceptive to the ways the artist alluded in his work to his own history and the people in