Picasso, a monster? These women have something different to say

Telegraph

19-03-2025

In 2023, on the 50th anniversary of his death, Pablo Picasso was posthumously selected as a candidate for character assassination. 'Monstrous misogynist', 'brutally chauvinistic' and 'notoriously cruel' were among the terms used in media headlines. The prominent British critic Adrian Searle referred to the artist as a 'vampire, sociopath and narcissist'. The BBC released a documentary titled Picasso: The Beauty and The Beast – the emphasis firmly on the latter. In New York, the Brooklyn Museum went so far that even the censorious were ashamed: It's Pablo-matic, an exhibition of Picasso works curated by comedian Hannah Gadsby, criticised its own contents at every turn – 'He's sold to us as this passionate, virile, tormented-genius man-ballsack,' Gadsby complained in looped clips – but was itself widely mocked.
Sue Roe's new book, Hidden Portraits, follows the lives of the six main women in Picasso's life: Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, François Gilot and Jacqueline Roque. Roe wants to illuminate the individual stories of these women, who've often been dismissed, she writes, as 'adjuncts to the artist's story… supporters, companions and muses.' The nuance of her approach is refreshing and admirable. Roe acknowledges that victim narratives, however fashionable, risk 'doing these women a disservice… Picasso transformed six women's lives – and fuller disclosure reveals the complexity, richness and excitement of life with him.'
And yet the illumination Roe brings is a brief spotlight, for six whole lives – a collective 465 years of existence – have been crammed together into a 300-page book. Each woman's 'biography' is thus whittled down to about 50 pages: that's a light introduction, more than anything else. Despite Roe's initial claim that this work will combat the prevailing Picasso-centric narrative, Hidden Portraits inadvertently reiterates the idea that these six women were supporting roles to the main act – she just adds a little biographical colour. Even her title seems to fetishise these women as the artist's subjects.
Furthermore, the claim that these stories are being 'released from the shadows' is marketing fluff, and hard to substantiate. Roe has made some important discoveries over the course of her research – for example, the truth about Walter's childhood and the identity of her father – but all these women's lives have already been documented by the women themselves in diaries or memoirs, or by biographers, or through interviews. Roe's task has been more one of accumulation and concentration than of true documentation.
This isn't necessarily for the worst. Roe's collection of stories reveals her strength as a historically-conscious anecdotalist, and her lively prose evokes Paris, and Europe, in the early 20th century. We learn of how Khokhlova, Picasso's first wife and a member of Diaghilev's Ballet Russes, lost all communication with her family in the early days of her relationship with the artist because of the Russian Revolution of 1917. When letters resumed in January 1920, 'she kept from her family any details of her opulent lifestyle; she did not even tell them who her husband was' – because of the dire conditions in which her relatives were living. It was only when her brother Vladimir visited the Schukin Museum in Moscow in August 1925 that they began to understand the scale of Picasso's celebrity. Vladimir wrote to his sister: 'I was finally able to see your husband's paintings… [they] take up three rooms!'
We read of the 'surrealist one-woman show' that Maar put on in January 1936 in the Deux Magots café in Place Saint-Germain des Prés, which won Picasso's attention. Dora was sitting at the cafe 'dressed all in black, cigarette in its long holder between her fingers, her gloves embroidered with red rosebuds'. Picasso watched from a nearby table with a friend while Dora 'peeled off her gloves, then began stabbing between her fingers with a penknife, occasionally drawing small drops of blood. Then she calmly replaced her gloves.'
Later, when Picasso was with Gilot, Roe recounts that one of the 'eccentric tasks' the latter had to undertake was 'recounting the money Picasso kept in a locked truck, once he had counted it himself'. This was because Picasso had seen Charlie Chaplin 'count sheaves of bank notes in Monsieur Verdoux, his favourite scene in the film, and been impressed by the speed of his counting, but in trying to match (or beat) it, he made mistakes.'
One of Roe's accomplishments is that she draws out how each of these women influenced Picasso's work: and how they correspond to different periods: Olivier was 'central to the development of the Rose Period', Maar played a key role in the technical design of Guernica's (1937) monumental structure. Roe's voice lends itself to beautiful descriptions of Picasso's work, albeit the close stylistic analysis of these paintings – as well-executed as it is – occasionally detracts from the stated focus of the book. This is at its most obvious when Roe spends a large part of the chapter on Roque discussing Picasso's artistic influences and his struggle with his own mortality.
Most importantly, in Hidden Portraits Picasso doesn't come across as an irredeemable monster. He gave most of his ex-wives and lovers pensions for the rest of their lives, and left some of them houses or apartments to live in. In an interview with Cabanne in 1974, after Picasso's death, Walter recalled that 'He was the one that did the washing, did the cooking, took care of Maya [their daughter], he did everything, except perhaps make the beds.' Obviously, not all of his behaviour was exemplary, but he didn't purport to be a paragon of virtue. He wasn't Jesus, but a Cubist genius. Or rather, in the words of Walter, he was a 'holy devil… but a most wonderful terror'.