In this, the third installment of John Richardson’s epic biography of Picasso, we find that the artist, age 36, having been spurned by two mistresses to whom he’d proposed marriage, has fled wartime ...

Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography By Norman Mailer, Atlantic Monthly Press, $35, 400 pp. Much of “Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man” is a shameless, cut-and- paste job.

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 ...