John Richardson Tribute: The Case of the Missing Medals

John Richardson

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

A few night ago, I was one of several speakers at a tribute to John Richardson given by the National Arts Club, which awarded the art historian its Gold Medal, several months after publication of A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, volume three of his acclaimed biography. I followed a daunting roster of golden-tongued praise-givers, including Fabrice Gabriel, literary attaché to the French Embassy (whose éloge quoted lyrically and appropriately from Apollinaire, adored by the subject of the honoree's masterpiece); the cultural diseuse Rosamond Bernier (who at 90 recently took her final bow at the Metropolitan Museum as the Cornelia Otis Skinner of art history); and Mark Stevens (the former New York Magazine art critic, now at work on a biography of Francis Bacon, another good friend from Richardson's louche London days.

In a dialogue with Bernier, Richardson shared a few of his typically rollicking but insightful anecdotes about his quarter-century friendship with Picasso, which gave the dinner's mesmerized guests a vivid sense of why Richardson is so incomparably qualified to write the definitive account of the complex and contradictory titan whose art was his biography made visual. As I said in my remarks, Richardson (whom I've known for 25 years, since we were contributing editors at Condé Nast's House & Garden and Vanity Fair) is the opposite of his characterization of Picasso as a creative vampire who sucked the psychic energy out of everyone around him to feed his demonic appetites (artistic no less than erotic).

Unlike that ultimate monster sacré, John has been the most generous colleague imaginable, sharing with me and countless other fellow writers his encyclopedic knowledge of art, Society with a capital S, and the intersection of those overlapping worlds. Though more often than not I've complied with his insistence that his unsparing but spot-on observations remain unattributed in print, despite cynics' assumptions that this outrageous raconteur is a modern Baron von Munchhausen, research assistants and attorneys who vet my articles for accuracy and potential lawsuits inevitably find everything that Richardson says checks out.

When John was finally presented his National Arts Club medal, he lamented that it lacked a ribbon so he could wear it, for although his father---a British Army general and Knight of the Bath---boasted "gongs" galore, he had none. Who knew? John remains a British subject (he works in the U.S. on a Green Card) and thus should long ago have been dubbed Sir John, or given one---or better yet, both---of the loftier royal accolades bestowed on yet another of his close artist friends, Lucian Freud: the Order of Merit and the Companionship of Honor.

All right, John's been an expatriate for decades, but he's more British than his old pal Princess Margaret. And what about France? Where's his Legion d'Honneur? Vite, vite! Although Richardson, now 84, remains prodigiously hearty, both Britain and France must make haste to honor his epic contribution to both cultures, while he's still here to savor such belated recognition.