Pablo Picasso Research Paper

Picasso’s Women
Picasso had a love/hate relationship with women. He was not an abuser, physically or verbally, but he did not always get along with them. He also couldn’t stay with one woman for a long time. After reading articles on Picasso, I learned that he had major relationships with several women throughout his life and fathered four children by three of them. His tumultuous and complicated love life can be seen through his art; the women often served as his artistic muses and are the subjects of many of his paintings. His first love which lasted 7 years was with Fernande Oliver (1881- 1966). She was credited for inspiring Picasso’s transition to the Rose Period. Later in his life, Picasso admitted that the figure from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) was based on Oliver. She was also the model for his radical Head of Woman (1909), which is widely
considered the first Cubist Sculpture. They were both frequently unfaithful to each other and had separated in 1912. A few years later, Picasso meets his first wife Olga Khokhlova (1891- 1954).
They were wed in a Russian Orthodox ceremony in Paris in 1918 and had a son, Paulo, in 1921. In the works like Portrait of Olga in an Armchair (1918), Picasso portrays her in Spanish appearance to satisfy his mother, who had hoped her son would marry a Spanish woman. As a classical ballerina, Khokhlova perfectly personified the ideals of Picasso’s neoclassical period, which was characterized by a renewed interest in realistic representations of the human form. Khokhlova insisted that she only be painted in a flattering academic manner, but Picasso would not always comply. In The Village Dance (1922), it shows him and a partner emotionally estranged from one another, powerfully capturing his melancholy state of mind in this period, and “going through the motions” of his marriage. In The Minotaurmachy (1935) and Bullfight; Death of Torero (1935), Khokhlova is often represented by a horse, betrayed and even gored by Picasso in the guise of the mythological minotaur or Spanish bull. As his marriage deteriorated, Picasso met another
woman. Picasso met Marie-Therese Walter (1909- 1977) when she was 17 and he was 45. The story of them meeting is told in different ways but what I got out of it is that it was love at first sight. He loved the way she looked and thought she would make a great model, and she was young and innocent and gullible. She served as the inspiration for some of Picasso’s most beautiful and sensual paintings and sculptures. She was his ideal muse and model in his Surrealist period, where he explored extreme physical and psychological states, often by rendering the human figure with imaginary and distorted forms. Picasso was separated but still married to Khokhlova when Walter got pregnant with Picasso’s daughter Maya, so he had to hide his relationship in reality and through his art. The Large Still Life with Pedestal Table (1951) is a disguised portrait of Walter using fruit to represent her eyes and breasts and table legs to represent her limbs. Picasso is the pitcher. The Sleeping Nude (1932) is a more overt expression of Water; her brightly painted body seems to radiate more heat than the sun outside the window, while her silhouetted half-moon face hints at nocturnal pleasures. Although Walter loved Picasso and he described her as “she was so sweet and would do anything I asked her,” his love for women prevailed. In 1935, Picasso was introduced to Dora Maar (1907- 1997). Portrait of Dora Maar (1937) is portrayed with bright acidic colors and angular forms. He was attracted to Maar’s intelligent and challenging personality, and she influenced Picasso to paint Guernica (1937) as a political statement. The Weeping Woman (1937) is related to Guernica. It depicts a tear-streaked Maar with a handkerchief as a symbol of the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War. Maar frequently suffered emotional crisis, and Picasso said for him, she was the weeping woman; it was a vision that forced itself upon him and that is the way he saw her and painted her for years. Another one of Picasso’s women was Francoise Gilot (b. 1921). She was his lover and muse from 1944 to 1953 and the mother of his two children. Many of the works produced while he was with Gilot, including his Joy of Life series attest to the happiness the couple had enjoyed during much of this time. However, Gilot was tired of Picasso’s infidelity and left him in 1953. In the Shadow, Picasso depicts himself in black silhouette, mourning her departure. Finally, Picasso meets Jacqueline Rogue (1926- 1986). Despite Picasso’s bad reputation with women, Rogue agrees to marry him under one condition. She said, “If one day, there is another muse, I’ll congratulate her, send her flowers, and I’ll be out the door.” Rogue was Picasso’s wife, lover, muse and loyal assistant from 1953 until his death in 1973. She was his inspiration for a series of works Picasso created in response to Delacroix’s masterpiece. She was instrumental in establishing the Musee Picasso in Paris after Picasso’s death. Overall, Picasso seems to me like a man with commitment issues. It’s as if he was always looking for something better and more exciting. The way he depicts women in his paintings is a resemblance of how he sees them. The women that he loved more, he depicted them with brighter colors, better features. The women that he had issues with, for example his first wife, he depicted as a horse in one of his paintings. Clearly, he had issues with most of them. I feel like he finally caught a break with his last wife because she was always by his side, and sacrificed herself for him and his art.

Works Cited: http://deyoung.famsf.org/blog/picasso-women-behind-artist http://www.sapergalleries.com/PicassoWomen.html