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When there was a bullfight at Arles or Nîmes, we would lunch with Picasso, and his last wife, Jacqueline Roque, would come over. He also had quite a lot of Mirós and Paul Klees. He bought it all before 1939, when prices were low. He had Picasso, Braque, Léger’s early Contrast Of Forms, Juan Gris - all done between 19.
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JOHN RICHARDSON – Douglas had one of the greatest private collections of Cubist paintings in the world. PURPLE – What was life with Douglas like? The family of the Baron de Castille went broke and the local bank sold it to us for $12,000! The Baron de Castille added them in 1780, before the Revolution. It was like a miniature of the Piazza di San Pietro. It was made of the same beautiful honey-colored stone as the Pont du Gare. We were coming out of the vineyards one day and came upon these columns in the Valley du Gard. We were staying at the Hôtel du Pont du Gard. He’d been to Cambridge and the Sorbonne, and had studied German history. Along with a friend of ours, we traveled around Europe in the early Fifties - did the Grand Tour. JOHN RICHARDSON – I met Douglas in 1949, in London. PURPLE – How did you end up living in Provence in the Fifties? I stopped going to art school and worked as an industrial designer, doing cheap utility stuff, which was fun.
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So I stayed in London throughout the war, putting out fires and doing air raid prevention. The army won’t keep you and it has to pay you a pension for the rest of your life. I was in the army for a week and I came down with rheumatic fever.
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I gave up painting because I wasn’t good enough at it. PURPLE – Did you originally want to become an artist? I didn’t know much about America, but they wanted me because I had lived with Douglas Cooper in the South of France at the Château de Castille, which is near the Pont du Gard. Then Christie’s auction house asked me to head their New York operation and suddenly I had a real job. I thought I would be able to live in London and rent a place in New York and go back and forth. I still had a flat in London, in the Albany apartments. But I got bored in London, so I moved to Provence and I lived there for ten or 12 years. My family has lived in London since the 18th Century. I was brought up in London and I’m a real Londoner. PURPLE – You arrived in New York in 1959, right? I’m like a demented bird bringing back bits and making my little nest - or, rather, my big nest. A lot of it isn’t really all that precious - in fact, some of it is rubbish. I’m like a witch doctor with all his junk around him - and a witch doctor doesn’t sell his fetishes. JOHN RICHARDSON - They’re just things I’ve accumulated in my life, that I’ve ended up with, that have stuck to me. PURPLE - You really have some amazing things here in your apartment. Daphne Guinness, one of John’s best friends, gave me the chance to meet him, one I couldn’t pass up. Yet he still thrives on making friends with younger generations. Richardson, a long-time contributor to Vanity Fair, is the living memory of modern art. In June, 2009, he curated “Mosqueteros,” an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery of Picasso’s last works, offering the possibility to reconsider these previously ill-received works from the end of the master’s life. Since the ’70s, Richardson has lived a flamboyant life in a gigantic loft in New York City, which he tends to like a European treasure chest. JOHN RICHARDSON is a British art historian, writer, and most importantly, Picasso’s intimate biographer. Interview by OLIVIER ZAHM and DAPHNE GUINNESS