The big picture: Brigitte Bardot visits Pablo Picasso in Cannes, 1956
This article is more than 15 years old
The 21-year-old 'sex kitten' holds her own against the old predator, Picasso, during a visit to his studio at Vallauris, near Cannes, during the film festival in 1956
Peter Conrad Sunday 8 May 2010
When the first Daguerreotype photograph was taken in the 1830s, a French artist sonorously prophesied: "From this day, painting is dead." It took Picasso to prove him wrong, by demonstrating the limits of photographic vision. The camera is restricted to surfaces; painting, if it is as aggressive and inquisitorial as Picasso's, can torment and transform the world of appearances, violently metamorphosing matter. "Reality must be torn apart," Picasso told his lover, Françoise Gilot. People, especially women, had to undergo the same painful fate.
Top 21 Most Expensive Paintings Ever Sold (2025 Updated)
Paying enormous sums for a painting might seem silly to a commoner, but it’s a serious hobby for many rich people and art enthusiasts! Classic artworks by world-famous painters like Da Vinci, Monet, Rembrandt, and Picasso are usually stored securely in museums.
Pablo Picasso, Playing cards, tobacco, bottle, and glass, 1914. Courtesy of Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
Picasso and Klee in the Heinz Berggruen Collection28 Aug 2025 — 1 Feb 2026 at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, Spain
28 OCTOBER
The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza is presenting Picasso and Klee in the Heinz Berggruen Collection, an exhibition organised in collaboration with the Museum Berggruen in Berlin that reveals the artistic connection between two geniuses of modern art, Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee.
My father, Picasso: secret daughter tells of posing in pink bootees
This article is more than 4 years old
A book of family memories paints the artist as doting dad, rather than the callous, ageing womaniser depicted by others
Dalya Alberge
Sun 16 Aug 2020
Pablo Picasso was still married to the former ballerina Olga Khokhlova when he became captivated by a 17-year-old girl outside the Galeries Lafayette in Paris in 1927.
REVIEWHidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso by Sue Roe review – artist as lothario
This article is more than 2 months old
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.
