The Sorcerer's Apprentice

John Richardson's father was Sir Wodehouse Richardson, a highly successful quartermaster in Britain's pre-1914 imperial campaigns who ended up founding the Army and Navy Stores. His maternal relations were butlers and ladies' maids to the Rothschilds at Mentmore. 'My upstairs-downstairs back-ground has proved, if anything, an advantage,' writes Richardson. It meant he could operate - socially, morally and intellectually speaking - free from orthodox restrictions or prejudices. The liberating sense of being an outsider was reinforced by 12 years' apprenticeship to the art historian Douglas Cooper. The two met in 1949 when Richardson was 25: a handsome, passionate and penniless art-lover, 13 years younger than Cooper, who had already built up the unrivalled collection of Cubist masterpieces which enabled him to terrorize the art world through a series of fearsome public vendettas. This rip-roaring memoir covers the years the couple spent together in Cooper's castle in Provence, which served as a kind of court annexe for Picasso and his entourage. Regular visitors - ranging from Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten to Anthony Blunt, W H Auden and Angus Wilson - represented the cream of what Richardson calls la haute pederastie. Kenneth Clarke left a vivid account of the founding father of all art historians, Bernard Berenson, whom he saw as a latterday Faust: a man of incomparably astute and refined sensibility whose dealings with the art market meant selling his sould to the devil. When Cooper and his companion visited Berenson just before he died, Richardson came away convinced that his master had made the same bargain. The Sorcerer's Apprentice tells the story of an extraordinary, complex and often ferocious affair which ended ostensibly in 1960 but was only finally resolved with Cooper's death in 1984, and the dedication to his memory seven years later of Richardson's definitive life of Picasso. Review by Hilary Spurling, whose books include 'The Unknown Matisse' (Kirkus UK)