The third volume of Picasso's biography is wickedly, even sinfully, entertaining.

A LIFE OF PICASSO

The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932

By John Richardson with Marilyn McCully

Knopf. 592 pp. $40

Note the article: This is "a" life, not "the" life of Picasso (1881-1973). That refusal of the magisterial -- a word already used by critics to describe this ongoing biography -- is honest and deliberate. As a young man, John Richardson lived for many years with Douglas Cooper, not only the leading private collector of Cubist painting and a friend of Picasso, but also a meticulous scholar noted for his penetrating intelligence and what his disciple has called the "evil queen ferocity" of his reviews and articles. Cooper enjoyed nothing more than to dissect -- more accurately, flay then mock -- a shallow monograph or faulty catalogue raisonn¿. There was never any nonsense about disinterested criticism. Cooper was as impassioned, forceful and subjective in his writing as Picasso was in his painting.

So, too, is Richardson in this biography. His book is energetically opinionated, sprightly and illuminating in its analytic passages, casually cruel in its put-downs of lesser artists (Jean Cocteau and Clive Bell are never mentioned without a gibe or a sneer), and downright lubricious in its fascination with sex. Compared to the learned historicism of an E.H. Gombrich or the urbane connoisseurship of a Kenneth Clark, Richardson's tell-all biography reads something like a high-brow gossip column. The book is wickedly, sinfully entertaining.

At times it might even seem morally corrupting, so free-spirited are the couples and the couplings depicted in these pages. Modern readers leading more conventional lives -- that is, most of us -- are liable to swing between wide-eyed amazement and wide-eyed envy. Wow! You really can have it all, at least if you're a genius. Not only did Picasso paint and sculpt masterpieces, he also bedded every woman who caught his fancy, employed a half-dozen servants and banked vaults full of money. His friends included Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Chanel. Instead of the Joneses, he kept up with Braque and Matisse. Even Picasso's holidays were spectacular: In the 1920s the artist hung out on the Riviera in the company of such luminaries as Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald and Sara and Gerald Murphy. What's more, the rising generation of surrealists -- and especially Andr¿ Breton -- revered him as their master. It's hardly surprising, then, that so prodigious and prodigal a genius compared himself to God, albeit a God who was married to a beautiful Russian ballerina and kept a pneumatic teenage mistress on the side.

The Triumphant Years -- the third of at least four and probably five volumes -- opens in 1917 in Rome as the 35-year-old Picasso started to work on the d¿cor and backdrops for "Parade," a star-studded ballet extravaganza produced by Diaghilev with program notes by Apollinaire, scenario by Cocteau, choreography by Massine and music by Satie. The days of starving for art in Montmartre were over, though not the bad-boy behavior: One night Stravinsky and Picasso were arrested for urinating in Naples's Galleria. But after the ground-breaking work of his youth -- especially the "Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907), which ushered in cubism -- Picasso had entered a neo-classical period. In Italy he studied the ancient marbles, especially the Farnese Hercules (which partly explains the gigantism of the figures in many of his paintings of this period), and he sketched some portraits of his friends that possess the clarity and purity of Ingres. Before long, the raffish bohemian had fallen in love with the dancer Olga Khokhlova, who led him to the altar and into a life of bourgeois respectability. Throughout the 1920s Picasso entertained duchesses, attended fancy dinners and costume parties, indulgently spoiled his son Paulo and dressed as a bourgeois p¿re de famille in three-piece suits or even plus-fours.

Picasso once called his collected artwork a kind of visual diary, a record of his inner life. As a result, Richardson's interpretations of the paintings rightly emphasize the human element, particularly the portraits that chronicle Picasso's evolving relationship with the women he loved. What astonishes the reader, though, is that this genius could draw with haunting classical exquisiteness one day -- and on the very next create an exuberant cubist-style painting full of dismembered, out-of-proportion body parts, garish tapestry-like colors and multiple perspectives. I myself guiltily prefer the graceful portraits of Olga and the sketches of Satie, Stravinsky and others to the fat nudes, tormented forms and persistent vaginal hollows and penile imagery of many of the paintings. Still, the massive "Large Bather" (1921), the maenad-frenzied "La Danse" (1925), the swirling "Artist and His Model" (1926) and the tormented "Large Nude in a Red Armchair (Olga)" (1929) are the works that made a difference in the history of art.

Besides tracing his subject's comings and goings, Richardson regularly interrupts his narrative with delicious pen portraits. As a result, The Triumphant Years sometimes seems as much a work of social and cultural history as an account of an artist's career. Consider this description of the legendary couturier Coco Chanel and the great French poet Pierre Reverdy: "In her early days, Chanel had preferred the company of artists and poets to that of her fashionable customers and so had no problem with Reverdy's solitary ways or humble origins -- hers were even humbler. Besides, they both loved food and wine. Nor did she mind his slovenly Napoleonic looks -- physical qualities meant less to her than intelligence, character, and charm. However, Chanel was never able to undermine Reverdy's loyalty to his wife Henriette, a former seamstress who had given up her work to live with him in poverty in Montmartre. . . . Chanel would be further shattered in 1926, when Reverdy decided to abandon worldly things to go and live with his wife at the monastery of Solesmes, as an oblate -- a lay monk. And there he stayed until his death in 1960. Reverdy and Chanel remained closely in touch; to her dying day she would be a fanatical champion of his work."

In his pictorial analyses, Richardson notes how the bulbous figures of Picasso's paintings often seem to be straining toward three dimensions. Unsurprisingly, then, in the 1930s he started to sculpt more often, sometimes in the spare, bone-like style that suggests Giacometti, sometimes with soft rounded forms reminiscent of Brancusi or Henry Moore. His pictorial references also changed: The image of Olga grew darker and tortured; he used private cabanas and beach scenes to represent his sexually fulfilling but secret life with his young mistress, Marie-Th¿r¿se Walter; the Picassian bull began to replace the guitar and pitcher as an icon (reflecting his growing interest in Mithraism, shamanism and his Spanish roots). He illustrated an edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses. He even made tapestries.

Besides telling Picasso's story as he sees it, Richardson aims to correct what he regards as misapprehensions about his hero, whom he treats as almost beyond good and evil. (He usually rationalizes the artist's callous behavior toward his wife and the women he picks up, uses and discards.) For instance, Richardson brushes off one distinguished scholar's theory -- that Picasso had an affair with Sara Murphy -- as "sheer novelettish fantasy." Yet this same so-called fantasist prominently blurbed the first volume of, yes, A Life of Picasso. As Diaghilev used to say, "In the theater there are no friends."

Even a kindly critic should note a few oddities about Richardson's book. The same works are confusingly referred to by both their French and English titles; some poetry is translated and some isn't; Apollinaire's "Jolie Rousse" (pretty redhead) is referred to as a "Jolie Russe" (pretty Russian). Certain key scholarly works, perhaps deliberately, fail to appear in the bibliography, including Hilary Spurling's Matisse and Jean Yves Tadie's definitive Marcel Proust. More serious is the failure to key the text to the illustrations in the color section: The order isn't strictly chronological, and one must flip around to find the painting discussed. Many times, too, Richardson speaks of a particularly sexy or unusual work -- and, frustratingly, there is no illustration whatsoever. In general, the Knopf production values fail to match those of the earlier volumes published by Random House. There were, for instance, more than 900 illustrations in volume one; there are only 322 in The Triumphant Years.

Still, we must be grateful for what we have. This isn't a coffee-table dust-gatherer or a reference to file away on a shelf and open only out of a sense of duty. It is a biography with real fizz, every page offering pleasure as well as insight and illumination. ¿

Michael Dirda's email address is mdirda@gmail.com. His latest book, "Classics for Pleasure," has just been published.