Hidden Portraits: Six Women Who Shaped Picasso's Life

Summary

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Private Lives of the Impressionists comes the first account of the women who loved Picasso―and who shaped his work far more than previously acknowledged.

Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque. These six extraordinary women shared Pablo Picasso’s life and were instrumental in his career, yet they have long been dismissed as simply passive models or muses.

In Hidden Portraits, acclaimed author Sue Roe reveals that their lives were―without exception―remarkable. They each pursued their own ambitions in dance, writing, painting, and more. All six overcame significant challenges, including Picasso’s subterfuges and betrayals as well as the wider social turbulence of their time. In bringing them to vivid life, Roe traces the extent to which each influenced Picasso’s work, from his sketches to masterpieces like Guernica. Spanning seventy years, from bohemian early-twentieth-century Montmartre to the glittering Riviera in the 1920s, and from Paris under Nazi occupation to Picasso’s death, and beyond, Hidden Portraits reclaims a set of brilliant women and in the process rewrites a vital chapter in the history of modern art.