PICASSO AND MARIE-THÉRÈSE WALTER — HIS MODEL AND LOVER FOR YEARS,
‘I’M PICASSO! YOU AND I ARE GOING TO DO GREAT THINGS TOGETHER’
On an otherwise ordinary day in January, 1927, in front of the Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris, Pablo Picasso looked across the street and saw a young woman whose appearance captivated him. He didn’t know her but he called out, “I’m Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together.”
So they did, and the great things are still talked about. She was Marie-Thérèse Walter, his model and lover for years after their abrupt meeting. ( He had to explain who he was; she had never heard of him.) He made her famous for decades and this year she’ll become better known still. The Tate Modern in London and the Picasso Museum in Paris have announced a major show focussed on her image for this autumn. It brings together more than 100 items — paintings, drawing and sculpture — in which Picasso interpreted her, her looks and her spirit.
“Picasso was more in love than he had ever been,” in the judgment of John Richardson, Picasso’s friend and biographer. In Picasso, love and art mixed and enriched each other. Her voluptuous form inspired not only erotic paintings but also his great- est sculptures. They may not be the best work of his career, or the most original, but they are for certain the sexiest. Glancing across the street, he made a shrewd choice.
In studying Picasso’s career we all begin with Cubi sm, the early style that enshrined for all time his status as a pioneer (some say THE pioneer) in modern art. When you grasp that, you move on to the really complicated part, the women in his life.
Picasso scholars know that for much of his career he shaped and re- shaped his thinking in tune with each of the six women who shared his life and served as his model. Living with a woman who appeared soft and sensual, notably Marie-Thérèse Walter, turned his mind toward soft, sensual art. A sharper, more assertive woman, Dora Maar, could lead Picasso to use her image in wonderfully ingenious (or even grotesque) geometric forms.
In his youth his mistress was a professional model, Fernande Olivier, who still lives in Picasso legend for having the nerve to confess that she never figured out what Cubism was all about. Next came Olga Khoklova, his first wife, a Russian ballet dancer with upper-class ambitions, which Picasso vainly tried to satisfy until mental illness destroyed her. She evoked Picasso’s neo-classical impulse, leading to stately portraits. She was followed by Marie-Thérèse Walter.
Dora Maar, a photographer and an intellectual, came next — or actually overlapped with Walter. Françoise Gilot, an art student (21 when they met) and a good painter, had two children with Picasso before she left him and wrote a successful and well-reviewed book, Life with Picasso, the best intimate view we have of him — though not, as his friends pointed out, an entirely kind one. Jacqueline Roque took care of Picasso in old age, married him (when he was 79, she was 35) and inspired hundreds of lovely portraits. She committed suicide in 1986, 13 years after Picasso’s death.
From the standpoint of the women in his life, Picasso must have often seemed cruel. One demonstration of that tendency was connected, ironically, with Guernica, the now much-admired mural- sized painting he made as a horrified response to the bombing of Guernica, a Basque village in northern Spain, by German and Italian warplanes intervening in the Spanish civil war.
He was finishing that work in 1937 when he was involved at the same time with Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter. He used both of them as models for the anguished women in the mural. One day, as the story goes, both turned up at his studio when he was putting finishing touches on Guernica. They began arguing. Both later denied having had a fight yet the story spread, with the added detail that their battle took place in front of Guernica.
Gilot, in Life with Picasso, re- told the story as she remembered Picasso telling it to her a few years later. “I kept on painting and they kept on arguing,” he said. Finally Marie-Thérèse turned to him and demanded that he make up his mind between them. Picasso summed up: “I was satisfied with things as they were. I told them they’d have to fight it out for themselves. So they began to wrestle. It’s one of my choicest memories.”
That fight, whether it actually happened or originated in Picasso’s imagination, is commemorated in Picasso’s painting, Birds in a Cage, once owned by the designer Elsa Schiaparelli. It portrays two doves in a cage that’s much too small for them. Dora, a ferocious black bird, claws the serene white dove, Marie-Thérèse, nestling on a clutch of eggs.
But in the biographies of Picasso women, Dora Maar owns the last line. When she was discarded in favour of the much younger Françoise Gilot, she suffered a breakdown and, when f eeling better, retreated into what friends considered “nun-like seclusion.” She explained, “After Picasso, only God.”