When John Richardson died at home in Manhattan in 2019, the fourth volume of his frisky biography of Pablo Picasso was, according to his obituary in The New York Times, “close to completion”. Three years later, The Minotaur Years, considerably slimmer than its predecessors, and focusing, like the second instalment, on just a single decade (1933-43), is finally being published on this side of the Atlantic, with two new collaborators, Ross Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga, name-checked on the title page.

Terrifically enjoyable, it concludes with a well-known remark by Picasso’s lover Dora Maar, the surrealist photographer, who, for much of the period covered by the book, was, as Richardson puts it with a characteristically cosmopolitan flourish, his maîtresse-en-titre. After Picasso’s death, Maar – a “complex”, “spiky” character, says Richardson, not averse to the odd “kinky ploy” – explained her turn to Catholicism: “After Picasso, there is only God.” One hopes that Richardson has discovered something similar, in the literary pantheon in the sky.

For Picasso fanatics, as well as devotees of Richardson’s distinctive voice (at once magisterial and indiscreet), The Minotaur Years – so-called because, during the 1930s, the artist became “obsessed” with the monster of Greek myth – offers compulsive reading. How could it be otherwise? The spell under discussion, mostly spanning Picasso’s 50s, yielded one masterpiece after another, from the Vollard Suite of etchings, to the “bleak monochrome modernism” of Guernica, first exhibited at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, to Night Fishing at Antibes (1939).

Then, of course, there was the artist’s sombre output during the war, when, despite harassment by the Gestapo, Picasso remained in Paris, modelling sculptures in his bathroom. Because of a fuel shortage, that was, he told the photographer Brassaï, “the only room you can heat in this big old barn” of his studio-apartment, on the top floors of a 17th-century mansion in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Richardson, who befriended Picasso after moving to Provence in the 1950s, is a master scene-setter and raconteur, capable of deftly introducing characters with a few strokes of his pen. His brisk narrative effortlessly untangles the complexities of Picasso’s life, moving from the “misery” of his marriage to his Russian wife, Olga, a former ballerina, to his relationships with Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter, who, in 1935, bore him a daughter, Maya. Surprisingly, for someone so macho, Picasso even changed the odd nappy.