Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters

'Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters' is a gallery of profiles of some of the most curious and creative figures that John Richardson has encountered during a career of more than fifty years. The subjects range from the monstrous art collector, Dr Barnes of Philadelphia to Peggy Guggenheim, Cecil Beaton, the Sitwells, Dali and such contemporary figures as the painters Brice Marden and Lucian Freud.

John Richardson's reputation was established internationally with the publication of the first volumes of his monumental biography of Picasso, described by Robert Hughes as "the most illuminating biography yet written on a twentieth-century artist".

With two further volumes in preparation, Richardson has devoted his life to study of the great painter, who befriended him in Provence in the fifties. The acclaim that greeted Richardson's Picasso Biography was based on his authority as a witness and his superb narrative skill.

In 'Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters', as in his recent memoir 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice', Richardson comes from out of the shadow of Picasso to describe a wider cast of writers, artists and eccentrics.

This collection is a portrait of a vanished age of which Richardson may be one of the last observers, and in some cases he is consciously saving his subjects' reputation from oblivion. In other cases, artists as celebrated as Warhol, Lucian Freud and Braque are described with an intimate knowledge of their working processes.

He knows their world and speaks with the authority of one who understands it. his portraits are always insightful, often poignant and sometimes scabrous. Richardson, like Truman Capote, one of his subjects, is the supreme raconteur. The wit is both barbed and revealing. His ability to present us with sharply etched close-ups of those who are usually observed from afar has no precedent in the artistic records of the last century.