Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso by Sue Roe review

The Guardian

24-03-2025

'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.
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.
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.
Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso by Sue Roe is published by Faber (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply