Picasso’s women, often dismissed as mere muses, were unquestionably essential to his creative and intellectual processes. Their stories are the subject of this group biography by the art historian Sue Roe, who knows the period well.
Two of the six killed themselves. Picasso was a coercive controller well before the term was coined; not untypical of his time. His own particular repeating pattern was to be attracted to strong women, compel them into swearing extreme oaths to love him forever – “…and whoever breaks this contract will be sentenced to death…” ran a declaration he signed in 1918 – then, when they got ill or pregnant or he found a new muse, to cast them off like used gloves, as novelists of the time were fond of writing. The unasked, and unanswerable, question resounding through the book’s harrowing narrative is: how much of his greatness would have been lost had he been nicer?
Picasso bumped into his first muse on a rickety staircase in Montmartre in 1904. It’s a scene straight out of La Bohème. Both were 23. “There’s a Spanish painter who has just come to live in our building who seems very taken with me,” wrote Fernande Olivier (1881-1966). She described her life up till now as “a Racine heroine condemned to torture”. She had been brought up by a sadistic aunt, her escape plan foundering when she married an equally vicious husband. She ran away. Five years modelling and mistressing around Montmartre preceded the staircase meeting. Picasso, ragingly jealous, locked her up in his room. It seems to have come as a relief: “With tea, books, a divan and a little cleaning to do, I was very, very happy.”
Olivier pulled Picasso’s art out of his melancholy blue period (1901-04), which had been triggered by the 1901 suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas, into the rose period (1904-06) typified by the gorgeous Garçon à la Pipe (1905), which may be read as a life-affirming self-portrait smothered in roses. After the entry of Georges Braque into Picasso’s life, and with the development of cubism, Olivier’s figure features in barrier-smashing art, such the avant-garde icon Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Thanks to the early socialite collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein, this period put Picasso’s foot on the first rhinestone rung of the celebrity ladder that he was to adore climbing. Playing at happy families, they adopted a 13-year-old girl, but she was swiftly returned to the orphanage by Olivier in circumstances that did not reflect well on Picasso (there were suggestions, though never proved, that he showed a sexual interest in the girl). His relationships always overlap, and he took two mistresses before asking Olivier to leave in 1911. Her story nevertheless ends well. She wrote kiss-and-tell memoirs whose suppression kept her supported by the increasingly rich artist until her death in 1966, aged 84.
In Rome in 1917, designing “decorations” for Sergei Diaghilev’s fashionable Ballets Russes, Picasso was boulversé by the exquisite ballerina Olga Khoklova. The daughter of a Ukrainian/Russian colonel, Khoklova had a high sense of self-worth and demanded marriage. On the surface all was brilliant. Parties, openings, high jinks and japes with Jean Cocteau, Guillaume Apollinaire, Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky contrasted with a more serious climate in Russia following Nicholas II’s abdication and the eruption of the country into revolution and civil war. Khoklova smiled for the cameras while her country starved, her once-grand family became destitute, and her father disappeared. But Picasso had discovered the circus. Clowns! Harlequins! Jugglers! Acrobats! Coco Chanel festooned herself in ropes of diamonds to grace the premiere of the circus-themed ballet Parade while Khoklova practised double deception, hiding her familial anguish from Picasso and, in her letters home, hiding her opulent life from her family.
Her dancing inspired marvellous, quick outline drawings that he worked up into ghastly slick forerunners of Tamara de Lempicka: all pose and machine-smooth modelling. Olga’s pregnancy rescued him from banality. Substance took over from style as he consciously referenced the Renaissance and the antique to record the maternity in monumental figures. When Olga was struck by a mystery disabling illness and could no longer dance or inspire, Picasso bought himself a Panhard car and partied on the Riviera with the Duke of Westminster, Chanel and Gerald and Sara Murphy, famous for appearing thinly disguised in Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.
He found his next muse on the beach. Suntanned, 17 and fanatically sportif, Marie-Thérèse Walter personified Riviera sybaritism. She is known as the “golden muse”, often painted with a giant beach ball and a flying ponytail. Simplified, sensual, lyrical cubist images of her morphed into political seriousness with Guernica (1937) for which she apparently modelled for two of the figures. This was the end of her usefulness. Femme au Béret (1937) is a cruel portrait. “It must be painful for a girl to see in a painting that she is on the way out,” Picasso said of the picture. When their daughter was two months old, he found a new mistress.
Sitting at table at the Deux Magots, Picasso watched Dora Maar repeatedly stabbing a knife between her outstretched fingers. Maar was a surrealist photographer, as technically accomplished as Cartier-Bresson, as inventive as Man Ray. Picasso embarked on a collaborative artistic relationship with Maar who brought photography into his art. While he created Guernica (with Walter modelling) Dora photographed the process. She is most famously immortalised in his Weeping Woman series, a negative interpretation of herself Maar disowned.
The legend of Maar and Walter cat-fighting over Picasso is, alas, apocryphal. In fact, Picasso reached a comfortable compromise between the two. Separated from wife Khoklova (remember her?) whom he had set up in a château – whence she stalked the mistresses, once piercing the hand of a prone sunbathing one with her high heel – Picasso settled into seeing Maar on weekdays and Walter at weekends. A lot of money and a lot of houses made the arrangement work. Each woman was, after all, bound to eternal love and loyalty by the death-penalty oath.
The break-up of the loose but mutually productive relationship with Maar finally ended in 1943 at Le Catalan, when the 62-year-old Picasso got up from their café table to present a bowl of cherries to a pretty 21-year-old. Françoise Gilot was moneyed, privileged, self-assured and seemingly entirely untroubled by self-doubt. She would get up at midday to do a little yoga and eat cakes before dotting into art school to paint and have Important Conversations. She studied cubism to please Picasso but she said it hardly brought them closer together. Picasso refused to divorce Khoklova because he didn’t want to give her any money. After ten years, Gilot walked out, taking their two children, Claude and Paloma. Nobody left Picasso! He whirled into vengeance, burning every trace of her, including her paintings. He forbade gallerists to show her work, effectively cancelling her and making her life so impossible that she left France. Despite his lawsuits, her memoir Life with Picasso sold over a million copies. Her sub-Picasso paintings are accomplished enough but not very good, though they sold well because of the association. In 2021, her Paloma à la Guitare was auctioned for $3.1m.
“Women are either goddesses or doormats,” Picasso reportedly said. Jacqueline Roque was to him a doormat. He subjected her to all sorts of humiliations for nearly nine years before marrying her in 1961. Khoklova had died in 1955 when he was already deep into the affair with Roque, his model for the series of variations on Delacroix’s painting Les Femmes d’Alger. Picasso plunged his young bride into a nostalgic tour of his life, revisiting the Montmartre staircases of his youth, the bull fights, circus and masquerades. Old-man sentimentality or conscious strategy? Was he deliberately reshaping his past for the much younger wife who would outlive him and curate the biographical legend? His art also turned retrospective. Was he claiming his place in the company of the gods as he produced numerous variations on themes by Rembrandt, Goya, Ingres, Delacroix and Manet?
Photo by Robert Capa / International Center of Photography
The show celebrating his 85th birthday drew 850,000 visitors. One of Rocque’s important jobs was to act as gatekeeper. By the time Picasso died in 1973, aged 91 and super-famous, she was in full control. When she barred Picasso’s grandson Pablito from the funeral, he drank a bottle of bleach and took weeks to die, agonisingly. Picasso’s son Paulo suffered clinical depression and died of drink. Walter hanged herself. The widowed Rocque gave up on keeping order among the squabbling heirs in 1986, and shot herself.
Picasso’s relations with his nearest and dearest are hardly uplifting. More than most, they raise the old question of whether we can go on loving the art of a thorough-going shit. The author of In Montmartre, In Montparnasse and The Private Lives of the Impressionists, Roe has a deep knowledge of the period and the milieu. Wisely, she is content to act as straightforward narrator. Moral judgement is up to us.
“Women are machines for suffering,” Picasso once told François Gilot. It’s a chilling conclusion.
Sue Prideaux’s “Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin” is published by Faber & Faber
Hidden Portraits: the Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso
Sue Roe
Faber & Faber, 304pp, £25
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This article appears in the 02 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What is school for?