Quote of Note | John Richardson

1919“It helps to know that the pitchers in his still lifes are almost always the ones with the spout sticking up like a phallus. And the fruit dish: a few soft peaches are the breasts. When you crack the codes, you understand that they are pictures about his love of a woman, his desire, his anger, his disdain. And you understand why his pictures that only show a pitcher and fruit dish can be so sexy and also so unbelievably sad. And then he turned everything over again and suddenly he was the very fruit dish himself. This is one of the greatest challenges when writing about Picasso, because for much of what one writes about him, the exact opposite is also true. A person with such an extreme personality, with such extraordinary hypersensitivity, with so many contradictions—that kind of person usually ends up in the nuthouse.”

-Picasso biographer John Richardson, interviewed by Cornelius Tittel in 032c