MUST RUN 4/11

APPRAISER ASSOCIATION WILL HONOR JOHN RICHARDSON APRIL 29 IN NYC

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NEW YORK CITY — On Tuesday, April 29, John Richardson, art historian and biographer, will be honored with the Appraisers Association of America Award for Excellence at a luncheon, for his four-volume publication, A Life of Picasso, the third of which was recently published to wide acclaim.

Art historian and renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art lecturer Rosamund Bernier will give the keynote address: also in attendance will be Dr Geza von Habsburg, former director of Christie’s, Europe and leading expert on Faberge and imperial treasures, who will introduce Bernier; and David Nash, distinguished Modern Impressionist expert and art dealer of Mitchell-Innes & Nash, who will introduce Richardson.

Richardson was born in London in 1924. He studied at the Slade School of Art and went on to work as an industrial designer before becoming an art and fiction critic. In 1951 he moved to Provence, where he and Douglas Cooper, the British collector, bought the Chateau de Castille near Avignon and transformed it into a private museum of Cubism.

During the next ten years he lived in France and became a close friend of Picasso, as well as of Braque, Leger and de Stael. Besides writing books on Manet and Braque, he embarked on an analytical study of Picasso’s portraits, now part of his on-going biography.

In 1960, Richardson moved to New York, where he organized a nine-gallery Picasso retrospective in 1962 and a Braque retrospective in 1964. Christie’s then appointed him head of its United States operation, which he ran for the next nine years. In 1973 he joined M. Knoedler & Co, Inc as vice president in charge of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century painting, and later became managing director of Artemis, a mutual fund specializing in works of art.

In 1980 he decided to devote all his time to writing. Besides working on his Picasso biography, he has been a contributor to The New York Review Books, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. In 1993 he was elected to the British Academy and in 1995 was appointed Slade Professor of Art at Oxford.

The first volume of his four-volume Picasso biography was published in 1992 to wide acclaim and won England’s prestigious Whitebread Prize. The second volume was published in November 1996. The author is currently working on the fourth volume of his biography and helping the Gagosian Gallery organize exhibitions of classic Twentieth Century art.

A reception will take place from 11 am to noon and the award luncheon will follow from noon to 2 pm. Tickets are: $165 AAA members; $225 guests and nonmembers; $300 individual patron tickets; $600 individual benefactor tickets; $1,000 individual sponsor tickets: $3,000 patron tables for ten; $6,000 benefactor tables for ten; $10,000 sponsor tables for ten.

For tickets: Appraisers Association of America, 386 Park Avenue South, Suite 2000, New York NY 10016, 212-889-5404, extension 11, or e-mail cnelson@appraiserassoc.org.