HIDDEN PORTRAITS

Art lovers.

Roe offers colorful portraits of six women involved with Pablo Picasso (1881-1973): Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque. “Their relationships with Picasso transformed their lives,” Roe asserts, “and they enhanced and underpinned his.” Olivier was 22, an artists’ model, when, in 1904, she met a young Spanish painter who lived in her building and was swept up in his artistic world. Khokhlova, a ballerina, met Picasso in 1917, when he was working on scenery for the Ballets Russes in Rome. They married in 1918; a son, Paulo, was born in 1921. Picasso was successful by then, able to live well and to help out Olga’s Russian family. Then one day he encountered 17-year-old Walter and asked her to model. Marie-Therese “knew nothing about painting; nor did she ever take any interest in it,” Roe observes. “She just loved Picasso.” The 45-year-old married painter would install her in lodgings near where he was staying with Olga and Paulo. She inspired a “flood of brilliant new work,” Roe writes. In December 1934, eight years into their relationship, Walter became pregnant; their daughter was born in September 1935, causing Picasso to press for a legal separation from his distraught wife. He met photographer Maar in the summer of 1936, which effectively ended his relationship with Walter; he was still involved with Maar when he met 21-year-old Gilot, a painter who eventually left him. Roque was the “devoted, energetic” wife of Picasso’s last years. Roe persuasively depicts the women as more than “silent muses,” but her recounting of Picasso’s betrayals belies the “positive images” that she tries to create.

A vividly detailed group biography.