In 2017, I had the opportunity to see the Salvador Dalí exhibition in Berlin. Dali's chaotic, genius pieces have always captivated me. His ability to project our crazy dreams and subconscious onto canvas is truly remarkable. What's even more fascinating is how his work, some more futuristic and others more questionable, seems to fit perfectly into today's reality. Dali's influence on modern art and culture is undeniably profound, shaping our perceptions and sparking new artistic expressions. His work has not only left an indelible mark on our collective consciousness but has also inspired a myriad of transformative impacts. Personally, I am deeply moved and inspired by the unparalleled influence of his art, and I believe his work will continue to inspire generations to come.
Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso by Sue Roe review – artist as lothario
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Françoise Gilot is the most compelling figure in this biography of the painter’s lovers – but you get the feeling she would have loathed this book
Rachel Cooke Monday 24 March 2025
“No woman leaves a man like me,” Pablo Picasso is supposed to have declared to Françoise Gilot, his partner and the mother of two of his children, in the spring of 1953. The couple had by this point been together for a decade, their first encounter having taken place in 1943 in a black market cafe in Paris (Picasso, who was then 61, had approached the 21-year-old Gilot bearing a bowl of cherries). But now he’d become involved with Jacqueline Roque, the woman with whom he’d go on to spend the final years of his life.
What to do about this? Gilot would not confront him. Better simply to call his bluff. “I am very secretive,” she said in an interview in 2016. “I smile and I’m polite, but that doesn’t mean that… I will do as I said I will do… He thought I would react like all his other women. That was a completely wrong opinion.” The following year, the question of her relationship with Picasso was resolved when she married a painter called Luc Simon.
Jacqueline Picasso, 1977. Photograph: Andre SAS/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
Gilot, clever and hard working, was an artist in her own right whose relationship to Picasso even in later life was vexed. In 1964, she published a brilliant, bestselling memoir of her time with him (he was enraged, and so was the French establishment on his behalf), but thereafter, she often disdained to talk of him. She preferred to discuss her work, which is held by, among other institutions, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. If Picasso’s influence on her art was clear, she was adamant that it had made its mark before she met him (she had studied his pictures). Leaving him hadn’t been liberating, she insisted, for the simple reason that she hadn’t been a prisoner in the first place.
Gilot appears on the cover of Sue Roe’s new book, Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso, in a famous photograph by Robert Doisneau, and from the moment you look at it – her famous lover reclines on a divan in the background, wearing a Breton shirt – the feeling grows that there’s something wrong here. She would surely have loathed this book, and not only because it defines all its subjects only in relation to Picasso; try as Roe might to insist that each of her women is equally worthy of attention, there’s no getting away from the fact that this is not the case. Several books have been written about Gilot, and I’d be happy to read any of them (I recommend About Women, a collection of conversations between her and the American writer Lisa Alther). But about other of Picasso’s lovers there is, I’m afraid, somewhat less to be said.
Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova, c1920s. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images
The book comprises six biographical essays, though self-containment is tricky given that Picasso usually began his next relationship before he had ended his last (the book’s structure isn’t always fit for the time frames involved). It begins with Fernande Olivier, the artist’s model who lived with him in Montmartre between 1905 and 1912, and who appears, in various guises, in many of the Rose Period portraits. She is succeeded by the Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova, and she, in turn, by the model Marie-Thérèse Walter. Next comes Dora Maar, the photographer and painter, to be followed by Gilot and Roque, a saleswoman in a pottery shop. After Gilot, Maar is the most interesting, not least for her influence on Picasso’s Guernica(she first caught Picasso’s attention in a cafe by peeling off her gloves and stabbing between her fingers with a penknife).
Sometimes, there’s light relief. The scene – possibly unreliable, since several different accounts of it exist – in which Walter and Maar physically fight as Picasso looks on is straight out of a film by François Ozon. But mostly – Gilot being the exception – Picasso leaves these women devastated. It’s not only his restlessness and unthinking cruelty; while once they were living in Technicolor, now they’re back in black and white. Roe tells her stories straightforwardly, though she can be both repetitive and a touch Mills & Boon (“We can only imagine the chemistry between the charismatic, seductive, black-eyed painter, who by all accounts exuded charisma even when standing still; and the poised, serious dancer…”). If this territory is new to you, the book won’t be without interest. But as a feminist project, however well-intentioned, it misfires badly.
The Artist and his Model (Le peintre et son modèle)
Pen and black ink and white chalk on light brown card.
Dated 30.6.70. and signed Picasso at the upper left.
Dated and numbered 30.6.70. / I in brush and black ink and white chalk on the reverse.
224 x 309 mm. (8 3/4 x 12 1/8 in.)
In the last two decades of his career Picasso produced a very large number of paintings, drawings and prints on the theme of the artist and model. Indeed, as one scholar has noted, ‘the theme [is] one of the most frequently recurring motifs of Picasso’s late period…During Picasso’s later years, as he grew ever more obsessed with the theme, the repeated focus on the artist and his model became a means by which he could explore the mysteries of the creative process, parody the effects of aging and his own image as a living Old Master, while also, on a deeper level, actively denying his own fear of death.’ These works take a variety of forms, but in general depict a painter, armed with a palette and brushes, facing a canvas, usually seen from the side, and a nude model, either sitting or reclining. Sometimes the painter is shown alone with the canvas but without the model, while at times the scene is set in a studio, or else out of doors.
Pen and brown ink on a page from a large sketchbook.
Dated and numbered 1.1.59 / 111 at the upper left.
Numbered 331 and 5790 on the verso.
370 x 270 mm. (14 1/2 x 10 5/8 in.)
This drawing is likely to have come from one of two spiral-bound sketchbooks used by Picasso in 1958 and 1959. As the scholar Brigitte Léal has noted, ‘sketchbooks form an integral part of the whole of Picasso’s creative activity’, and some 175 sketchbooks by the artist are known or recorded, dating between 1894 and 1967. The earliest known example dates from when the artist was thirteen years old, and he continued the practice of using sketchbooks throughout almost the whole of his career. He often carried a small notebook in his pocket for making quick sketches, while larger sketchbooks or notebooks were used in the studio. While several of Picasso’s carnets have survived - notably twenty-nine examples today in the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris – many other sketchbooks have been broken up, while others are known only from a handful of individual pages.
Drawn on the 1st of January 1959, this large sheet was Picasso’s third drawing of the New Year. The previous drawing executed by the artist that day was a closely related composition of a dancing or embracing couple, and shared the same provenance as the present sheet until it was sold at auction in 2017. Both drawings come from one of the few late sketchbooks by Picasso. While the last two decades of his career were a time of great productivity for Picasso, not many sketchbooks are known from this fecund period. With the exception of 1962, when the artist filled eight sketchbooks with drawings inspired by Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Jacques-Louis David’s Rape of the Sabines, only eight other sketchbooks are known from the final decade and a half of his career, before his last known carnet of 1967. As Léal has written of Picasso’s late sketchbooks, ‘The carnets are no longer places for preparatory studies for the paintings, which they accompany rather than precede, but supports for exercises combining relaxation…and discipline…, dominated by the theme of the nude, a pretext for variations on the arabesque, which appears clearly, through these final notebooks, as the formal link connecting him to the heritage of Delacroix, Ingres and Manet.’
The artist’s son Claude has written of Picasso’s sketchbooks, that ‘They are, from one page to the next, an adventure – a diary of the painter...They are the notes working up to something or bouncing off something else, perhaps a sculpture onto a painting and back. The pages of the notebooks are the sketches for paintings but they are also often the afterwords. Sometimes they stand as elaborate works on their own. Picasso’s notebooks are stepping-stones to trampolines for somersaults.’
The present sheet was until recently in the collection of the artist’s granddaughter Marina Ruiz Picasso (b.1951), the only daughter of Picasso’s eldest son Paulo. Though her relationships with both her father and grandfather were troubled, she was the only legitimate grandchild of the artist alive at the time of his death in 1973, and therefore received the second-largest inheritance, after that of Picasso’s second wife Jacqueline. As Picasso’s biographer John Richardson has noted, Marina Picasso ‘differs from the artist’s other five heirs in that she has made a point of exhibiting as much as possible of her magnificent collection in a succession of traveling exhibitions…for students of modern art in cities which have never seen a Picasso retrospective, these exhibitions have been a revelation.’ This drawing from Marina Picasso’s collection, however, appears not to have previously been exhibited.
A photo-certificate from Claude Picasso, dated 12 November 2019, accompanies the present sheet.
Dated and numbered by the artist 5.1.51 / IV in pencil at the upper right.
Numbered 1088 / 24 in pencil on the verso.
269 x 210 mm. (10 5/8 x 8 1/4 in.)
Although motherhood and childhood are subjects that Pablo Picasso revisited throughout his career, the theme most notably presents itself in his oeuvre when the artist became a father himself. As his dealer and great champion Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler noted, ‘if one wanted to establish some sort of statistics of Picasso’s later subjects, it is quite certain that children would figure importantly. There is no esthetic reason for this. He has painted, drawn, etched, sculptured many children because he adores children, especially young ones…Even more so did he cherish and sketch his own children: Paulo, Maya, Claude, Paloma…The children painted or drawn by Picasso are of all ages. One can see them at every moment of their young lives. There are babies in the cradle, in their mother’s arms, children playing, Paulo riding a donkey, Maya with a little boat, Claude and Paloma with a little toy train.’
Many of Picasso’s earliest works on the theme of children date from the 1920s, following the birth of his eldest son Paulo in 1921. More paintings and drawings of children were produced in the late 1930s, with the birth of his daughter Maya (b.1935), and again in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with numerous depictions of Claude (b.1947) and Paloma (b.1949), his children with Françoise Gilot. However, although the three grandchildren born in Picasso’s lifetime – Pablo, known as ‘Pablito’ (b.1949), Marina (b.1950) and Bernard (b.1959), who were the children of his son Paulo - were close in age to his own children, there are very few portraits of them. The only drawings the artist made of one of his grandchildren were six sketches of his youngest grandson Bernard Ruiz Picasso as a newborn baby; all drawn on 9 November 1959 as a gift for the child and his mother, Christine Pauplin.
In her memoirs, the artist’s grandaughter Marina Picasso recalls that she and her brother Pablito were never the subject of one of Picasso’s works. As she writes, ‘There isn’t a single hint of our existence in his work, not one drawing or painting. When we went to La Californie [Picasso’s home and studio in Cannes, where he lived between 1955 and 1961], we would search for ourselves desperately on the walls, secretly flipping through the catalogues and art books, trying to find our features in a faun, a bacchanal, or the kaleidoscope of a still life. We came across studies and paintings of Maya, Picasso’s daughter with Marie-Thérèse Walter; sketches and portraits of Claude and Paloma, his children with Françoise Gilot; of fisherman, his tailor, people we didn’t know, dogs, cats, birds, lobsters, guitars, coffee pots, fruit bowls, jugs, leeks…but not a single sketch of us, his direct heirs.’
Drawn with a sharp pencil on January 5th, 1951, the present sheet is numbered IV and is one of a small group of drawings by Picasso of a mother and a female child, all drawn on the same day on successive pages of a sketchbook. The present sheet was followed, in the sequence of drawings made that day, by two closely related studies, numbered V and VI, which share the same provenance as this drawing. While this drawing depicts the mother holding her infant in her lap, the two subsequent images drawn later the same day show her bringing the child to its cradle, kissing her, and laying her down.
It may be argued that, despite their intimacy and charm, these three drawings - which were unknown to Christian Zervos when he published his monumental catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s work - lack the sense of evident affection found in Picasso’s more finished portrait drawings of his daughter Paloma, and of the artist and his family, which date from just ten days later. At the time these drawings were made, Picasso was supremely happy in his life with Françoise Gilot, and often drew his own children. Claude and Paloma were, however, by this time much older than the baby girl shown in the present sheet. As such, and despite Marina Picasso’s later protestations to the contrary, it may be tentatively suggested that this drawing, and the two related pencil studies executed the same day, may in fact have been drawn on a visit by Picasso to his new granddaughter, the infant Marina, who would have been less than two months old at the time.
The present sheet was until recently in the collection of Marina Ruiz Picasso, the only daughter of Picasso’s eldest son Paulo. Though her relationships with both her father and grandfather were extremely troubled, she was the only legitimate grandchild of the artist alive at the time of his death in 1973, and therefore received the largest inheritance, second only to that of Picasso’s second wife Jacqueline. Marina Picasso has also been the most vocal of the Picasso descendants in regards to her relationship, or lack thereof, with the artist; her memoir Picasso: My Grandfather details his neglect of her and her immediate family throughout his life.
Nevertheless, as Picasso’s biographer, the late John Richardson, has noted, Marina Picasso ‘differs from the artist’s other five heirs in that she has made a point of exhibiting as much as possible of her magnificent collection in a succession of traveling exhibitions…As Marina says, “despite the resentment I felt for my grandfather, I owe this to his memory”. And, for students of modern art in cities which have never seen a Picasso retrospective, these exhibitions have been a revelation.’ The present sheet from Marina Picasso’s collection, however, appears not to have previously been exhibited.
A photo-certificate from Claude Picasso, dated 15 May 2017, accompanies the present sheet
