BOOK REVIEW : Biography of Picasso Is a Labor of Love : PICASSO Life and Art <i> by Pierre Daix translated by Olivia Emmet</i> : Harper/Collins Icon; $30; 460 pages; illustrated

This is Picasso for Picassophiles who have considerably more than a nodding acquaintance with their idol.

Pierre Daix was not only a personal friend of Picasso but the author of two exhaustive catalogues of the artist’s work.

Originally published in French seven years ago, this biography has since been revised and expanded. In addition to an examination of Picasso’s vast, varied output, Daix offers an overview of the political, social and cultural ferment in France during his subject’s long creative life, a period that encompassed three-quarters of the 20th Century.

Be prepared and forewarned. The pivotal personalities of the period between 1900 and 1975 pop in and out of these pages at will, fully expecting to be recognized by the reader. In addition to the poets, painters and collectors whose names will be familiar, there are the mistresses, dealers, agents and critics who may be virtual strangers even to those who never miss a Picasso retrospective.

Daix also mentions casual acquaintances and chance encounters, including scores of tangential figures because they, too, seem to have had an observable effect upon the artist. Although Daix sometimes pauses to introduce this enormous cast, in general he allows his readers to fend for themselves.

Although it can be flattering to be in such august and stimulating company, it’s also somewhat daunting. Imagine three of the mistresses, Madeleine, Alice and Fernande, in the same paragraph. Which was the one who reigned supreme during the so-called Rose Period, and was Alice Pincet simultaneous or subsequent? Such distinctions may seem trivial if you’re wandering through a museum, but they become crucial when you’re reading Daix’s biography.

Because the author is convinced that Picasso’s life and work were inextricable, the order in which the lovers appeared becomes central to his view of the evolution of styles. “Each of these women was associated by him with projects previously unknown in art.”

An understanding of Picasso’s political notions is also useful. According to Daix, his communist sympathies were merely idealistic “and never implied the least submission of his art or his thinking to party politics.”

Although Picasso’s traditional Spanish Catholic background surfaces symbolically in many paintings, he reacted to its rigidity by becoming an anti-clerical atheist. Then there was the tremendous influence of the circle of literary friends--Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Reverdy, Cocteau, Eluard and Breton, all of whom inspired him at one time or another. Painters like Matisse, Braque, Miro and Derain were his rivals in art and in love.

Would Picasso have been Picasso without the visionary patrons, notably Gertrude and Leo Stein; without Kahnweiler, the dealer who turned a Spanish provincial into an international celebrity?

Daix explores the assorted influences of Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, the avant-garde music of Stravinsky and the delights of cinema as an art form. The author’s own conversations with Picasso not only add gloss to this plethora of material but often oblige him to revise prior judgments.

Daix’s stated intent is to establish the connection between Picasso’s “creative itinerary” and “the facts not only of his private life but of the intellectual life of the 20th Century, in which Picasso was simultaneously actor, witness and didactic explorer.”

That is an exceedingly tall order, and to compress everything into a single volume means that there is neither time nor space for much explication. As an inevitable result of Daix’s lofty aim, the prose is necessarily dense and sometimes elliptical, an effect exaggerated by a skillful but literal translation from the original French.

In striving to expand his investigation from a merely critical discussion of the painting, Daix, by his own admission, aims “for a nuance which will avoid the details.” With disarming modesty, Daix quotes the historian Fernand Braudel: “A danger of large enterprises is getting lost in them: sometimes, with great pleasure.” Clearly a labor of love for the author, “Picasso: Life and Art” demands a matching commitment from the reader.