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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Disappointment - bring back Picasso, 10 Jul 2002
The book was such a disappointment after the enjoyable "Sorcerer's Apprentice" - fascinating reminiscences of people Richardson knew well, sewn together by the theme of Douglas Cooper's fiendishness."Sacred Monsters" is an unstructured hotchpotch of essays about seemingly randomly selected people, often unknown. Nor are these reminiscences - they are so often constructed in large part of quotations from others (though he takes every opportunity to name-drop if he ever met the subject... or even met someone who had met the subject) - so much so, that some chapters are little more than extracts from someone else's book with a minimal commentary. The chapters on Warhol and Hammer are revealing and fascinating... but you are three-quarters through the book before finding them. The chapter on Braque will be enjoyable if you haven't just read it in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"!! The book's failings in content and structure are augmented by the over-erudite prose, the unnecessarily self-aggrandising name-dropping, and the recurrent stabbing at favourite enemies (whatever did Aime Maeght do to Richardson??). I read to the end, but it was hard work and rarely enjoyable. Why oh why did he waste his time on this instead of getting on with the excellent biography of Picasso which seems marooned on the second of its four volumes?
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