“Ma femme, c’est merveilleux” were supposedly the parting words of Pablo Picasso, moments before he died at 91 in his Provence farmhouse in 1973. They were intended for his then wife, Jacqueline Roque, the final Picasso femme—but it doesn’t take a titanic feat of research on the love-crazed Andalusian to wonder just how many other merveilleux women he bestowed the same gooey honorific upon.
Picasso’s philandering began at the tender age of 14, when he patronized his first brothel. The next eight decades saw an almost endless parade of women who should’ve known better but couldn’t help themselves. Sue Roe’s Hidden Portraits covers six of them (though there were many, many more).
What these women largely missed, dazzled by the artist’s infamous charm, was that they were falling in love with an all-time amorous narcissist. The first to plunge into the flytrap was Fernande Olivier, a penniless, 23-year-old divorcée who met an equally penniless Picasso in Paris in the spring of 1904. Two years later, having made his first string of consequential art sales, Picasso had an aproned maid, a roomy apartment in Montmartre, a circle of bohemians such as the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the fashion designer Paul Poiret, and an era-defining work which immortalized, as one of the steely Demoiselles d’Avignon, his doting muse, Fernande.
By the end of Roe’s book, aproned maids seem rather innocent fare. From Montparnasse to the Côte d’Azur, from this villa to that mas provençal, Roe guides us through Picasso’s two marriages, four children, countless affairs, the litany of dealers he made rich, and the friends and acquaintances he adopted and discarded like tiresome pets. Amid all this are the six women who brought their extraordinary capacity for giving love to an egoist with an extraordinary appetite for receiving it.
In return for tolerating Picasso’s bottomless solipsism, they lived the thrill of the Picasso whirlwind, which came complete with an eternal tribute in paint. Olga Khokhlova became the emblem of his neoclassical period; Marie-Thérèse Walter, a curvaceous ode to Aphrodite; Dora Maar, the Weeping Woman; Françoise Gilot, a splash of a “certain blue” in many of his works; and Jacqueline, the sphinx-like figure dominating his late period.
In six compact biographies, Roe attempts to retrieve the stories of women long lost in Picasso’s gargantuan shadow. It’s an unenviable task. True, these women all garnered their own fame: Olga was a renowned ballerina in the Diaghilev troupe; Dora, a photographer whose work brought her into the vaunted company of André Breton, Jacques Prévert, and, later, Jacques Lacan. But then came Picasso, the great gynophage swallowing everything. The only one who seemed to emerge with her artistic ambitions intact was Françoise, an artist whose intellectual curiosity—she was a minor authority on art history and the philosophy of Hegel—far surpassed that of Picasso, a man who never stepped off the European continent and who almost never read.
“You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for,” Picasso’s mother, Doña María, told her future daughter-in-law Olga, Picasso’s first wife, when they first met. “I don’t believe any woman would be happy with my son. He’s available for himself but no one else.” When it came to love affairs, the profligate Picasso considered concepts like “clean breaks” and “faithfulness” as just more boundaries that didn’t apply to him. This philosophy reached its acme in 1946 when Picasso, still married to Olga, yearning for Marie-Thérèse, and sleeping with Dora, is photographed with his arm wrapped around a young, ravishing, and conspicuously pregnant Françoise.
Was the ecstasy of being with the world’s greatest painter reward enough? In other words, why in God’s name did they put up with him? It’s the obvious question, the most interesting one, but Roe struggles to answer it. Paragraphs are spent detailing Marie-Thérèse’s adolescent interest in Swedish gymnastics, and Jacqueline’s wanderings around the Mougins market, “where she bought the local goat’s cheese.”
On the other hand, the increasingly scandalous age gaps, culminating with Picasso, 72, seducing Jacqueline, 26, are among the sordid goings-on that Roe fails to fully examine. Another instance: In 1928, Olga, on the mend after a string of surgeries to fix unspecified gynecological issues, begins to suspect that Picasso is having an affair. Predictably, her woman’s intuition is right-on. While his wife was in and out of clinics and operating theaters, Picasso had been springing off to the neighbor’s house, where his new fling, 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse, lay waiting. Yet Roe, who wants “to illuminate rather than judge” the women and their shared amour, dares not muster any of the fire and brimstone, nor any of the humor, that such dissolute and salacious material requires.
Why these women tolerated this intolerable man probably has something to do with his charisma, which, by all accounts, was astounding. John Berger compared it only to Napoleon’s; Marie-Thérèse called Picasso “a most wonderful terror.” The artist also had an unusual propensity for schmaltz; this softer side, which Roe highlights, is often ignored in the vast compendium of Picasso scholarship. Roe’s Picasso is a man who writes soaring love letters and lavishes his women with saccharine romantic gestures. When Maya, the artist’s daughter with Marie-Thérèse, is born in 1935, Picasso spends weeks doing laundry, housework, cooking, and rearing the newborn while Marie-Thérèse convalesces on the divan.
This combination of magnetism and chivalry is Roe’s hypothesis for why these six women fell for an utterly impossible man. And, as Doña María had foretold, they paid dearly for it. Dora and Olga had breakdowns. Jacqueline spent 13 years tying up her dead husband’s loose ends before taking her own life at the age of 60.
The exception was Françoise, who detailed her decade-long relationship with the artist in the 1964 book Life with Picasso, and who remains, to this day, the only one of Picasso’s women to have left him. Charming and formidable, Françoise was, in the words of Picasso’s cabal, “à la hauteur de la tâche,” or “up to the task” of being Picasso’s partner. “Lions mate with lions,” Françoise once said. “Lions do not mate with mice. They prefer someone of their own kind.” She described her love for him like she described art-making: a state of “logical delirium.”
Picasso may have had a soft spot for femmes merveilleuses, but ultimately he was only ever looking for the next subject. “I couldn’t live without devoting all my time to it,” Picasso said about his work. “I love it as the only end of my life.”
Elroy Rosenberg is an arts journalist and editor from Melbourne
