"Similarly, while its cover features a fabulous Robert Doisneau photograph of one of these six women, artist Françoise Gilot, behind her lurks Pablo Picasso, unmistakable in his trademark Breton striped shirt, lounging on a daybed. Her eyes look up in his direction and so ours follow. While she is center stage, he is the one who claims our gaze. And speaking of claiming, Gilot wears a leafy crown in Doisneau's photo, like many a muse in art before her,"
"Considering John Richardson's exhaustive four-volume biography, and countless other books, articles, reviews, movies, exhibition catalogs, and whatever else, likely not. And yet, as Roe notes at the outset of her introduction, " Hidden Portraits is the first book in English to tell the story of all six significant women in Picasso's life." Those women were, by the way: Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque."
Six women—Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque—played significant roles in Pablo Picasso's life. Photographic and artistic imagery often positions Picasso as the dominant figure even when women occupy the visual foreground. Françoise Gilot's Doisneau portrait shows her adorned with a leafy crown and a bull-head pendant while Picasso's presence still claims the gaze. The bull motif recurs obsessively across Picasso's oeuvre. The women exercised agency and achieved personal victories, yet cultural framing repeatedly reduces them to muses and lovers within Picasso's mythos. Their relationships combined intimacy, artistic influence, and public representation, complicating simple muse-artist binaries.
Read at Hyperallergic
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]