Hidden Portraits by Sue Roe: The only woman who gave Picasso a taste of his own medicine

When it came to the women in Picasso’s long life – he was 91 when he turned up his toes in 1972 – time after time the pattern was identical, fulfilling his mother’s prophecy: ‘I don’t believe any woman would be happy with my son.’

Adoration and idealisation gave way to hatred, demonisation and, finally, indifference. Lovely portraits of girls with ponytails, gambolling on beaches, metamorphosed into ‘screaming female forms’, the pictures of harridans, all talons and teeth.

Cubism, with its ugly distortions and fracturing, assisted the process. The mystery is, why didn’t women see it coming and run a mile? Everyone knew what Picasso – ‘the most successful artist of the 20th-century’ – was like, i.e. a blood-sucking predator.

Maybe, as they ‘succumbed to his magnetism’, to use Sue Roe’s words, each thought they’d be the one to save Picasso from himself, be the love of his life. Plus, of course, the adage that rascals are hugely appealing, who put in a lot of effort on the erotic front.

Hidden Portraits shows how Picasso’s assignations overlapped, required full-time deception and were as full of awkward encounters as a stage farce.

First, in 1904, came Fernande Olivier, who possessed ‘large, green, almond-shaped eyes and luxuriant chestnut-red hair’. She was an artist’s model in Montmartre, who said: ‘There’s a Spanish painter who has just come to live in our building and seems very taken with me.’

They moved in together and Fernande, who was the subject of 60 portraits, is the Rose Period muse with a recognisable long nose. Her main topics of conversation were hats, perfume and furs. When Picasso ditched her for Olga Khokhlova, she went to work as a cashier in a butcher’s shop, a teacher of diction and a compiler of horoscopes.

Fernande died in 1966, aged 84, still in love: ‘It was with Picasso alone that she had experienced happiness.’ But it was the sort of happiness that blotted out the rest of her days. Right until the end, Picasso paid her a monthly allowance on condition that she never wrote about him.

Picasso started to make money when dealers took him on. In demand, he additionally designed scenery for Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet. In 1917, when Olga was 25 and one of the dancers in the company, she met Picasso, with whom she went to live in opulent apartments in Paris and in a chateau in Normandy. They were married a year later in the city’s Russian Orthodox Church.

Soon enough, in his portraits of his bride, Picasso recorded how ‘her facial expressions betrayed obvious despair’. There is a sense, on the canvasses, of Olga’s ‘indisputable melancholy and sadness’, perhaps because she was exiled from her family, who perished in the Communist Revolution. (She died of cancer in 1955.)

By 1925, pictures of Olga were expressing a more acute ‘violent access of furious emotion’ – no wonder, as Picasso had been meeting 17-year-old Marie-Therese Walter, ‘slim, tallish, striking and noticeably athletic-looking’. Ding-Dong! as Leslie Phillips would say.

They kept up a clandestine relationship for nearly a decade. ‘The emotional and sensual charge was powerful and mutual.’ On holiday in Dinard, Brittany, with Olga, Picasso hid Marie-Therese in a beach hut.

As if this wasn’t sufficiently thrilling and daring, the artist started to see Dora Maar, a photographer. When Marie-Therese found out, she intercepted Dora and grabbed her roughly by the shoulders. Dora slapped her. Picasso was delighted.

According to Roe, from 1936, Dora and Picasso ‘were appearing everywhere together in public’, and where as a rule Picasso never permitted anyone entry to his studio, Dora photographed each stage of the composition of the anti-war masterpiece Guernica.

Indeed, the pair spent the war years together in Paris, where Picasso was barred by the Nazis from exhibiting, ‘placed under close surveillance and obliged to exercise caution’.

But not ‘romantic’ caution. Picasso spotted a girl named Francoise Gilot in a cafe. Dora was worse than upset, she was ‘beyond consolation and seriously depressed’, when her rival came to light. Picasso used this as a justification for clearing off. ‘I left her out of fear,’ he said. ‘Fear of her madness.’

Dora ended up in a house in Provence (purchased by Picasso), where, when it rained, water cascaded down the stairs. She died in 1997, aged 89, and has been played onscreen by Julianne Moore in the 1996 film Surviving Picasso.

By the time he got entangled with Francoise, Picasso’s philosophy was, ‘passion made its own rules’, so one should do as one pleased. In 1946, Francoise moved in but, as usual, ‘the degree of domesticity that seemed to have crept up on them all was making him feel trapped’.

Uniquely, Francoise was the one who called the whole thing off. ‘No woman leaves a man like me,’ thundered Picasso, genuinely shocked. Francoise moved to the US in 1961, and later married Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine. She died in 2023, aged 101. Of her and Picasso she said, ‘lions mate with lions, not with mice’. Good for her.

Making ceramics in the South of France, Picasso came across Jacqueline Roque, ‘petite, raven-haired, with the posture of a dancer’. Ding-Dong! again.

He was 72, she was 26. ‘Picasso had already noticed the striking young woman who worked in the pottery’, and she was quickly living with

the artist in his large properties, Villa la Californie in Cannes, and Chateau de Vauvenargues, near Aix-en-Provence. They were married in 1961.

Jacqueline safeguarded Picasso’s privacy and turned away visitors – including his own children, whom in earlier days he’d adoringly painted as harlequins: Paulo (son of Olga), Maya (daughter of Marie-Therese), and Paloma and Claude (daughter and son of Francoise).

As Roe diplomatically puts it: ‘His children’s visits ceased as Picasso, unwilling to become embroiled in any distractions at all, worked long hours.’

Jacqueline ‘had been his marvellous companion for the last 20 years, during which time her whole life revolved around him’. Yet how could that have been healthy – suffocating for the two of them, I’d have thought. In his last works, Picasso depicted himself and others as angry, gesticulating apes.

Picasso’s widow shot herself in 1986. Marie-Therese had hanged herself in 1977, ‘unable to endure life without Picasso’. Despite the suicides, Picasso’s women, as Roe says, ‘were stylish, good-looking and enjoyed fashionable clothes’. They were ‘adaptable, tenacious, courageous and showed fortitude in adversity’ – adversity always foisted on them by Picasso.

This book, the best on Picasso since John Richardson’s four-volume biography, brilliantly dissects ‘the excitement of life with him’ – excitement, and horror.