Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

Picasso was a man who was never alone. Throughout his life, every day was lived alongside his wives, his casual lovers, his favourite muses, his long-term mistresses. His many passionate relationships made for a turbulent life for both himself and his women. So turbulent in fact that two committed suicide, and two suffered mental breakdowns.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon depicts none of Picasso’s (1881-1973) lovers; the five naked women were all prostitutes. The painting was originally titled The Brothel of Avignon and included two men, clients of the young ladies. Picasso painted over the male figures, having the five women gaze boldly, even menacingly, at the viewer. The figures on the left were inspired by prehistoric art that had intrigued Picasso, and the two on the right by the African carved wooden masks he admired.

Breaking with all traditions of European painting, abandoning perspective in favour of a splintered direct picture plane, using raw, slashing paintstrokes, Desmoiselles was revolutionary when it was created in 1907. It was not merely controversial, it was downright inflammatory.

It also marked the first indication of Picasso’s invention of

Cubism, clearly seen in the hundreds of sketches he created on preparing the picture. Now regarded as the seminal painting of the 20th century, for many it marks the dawn of modern art.

The painting was never exhibited until 1916, and received a ferocious, outraged response from art critics. It remained rolled up in Picasso’s studio until 1924, when his artist friends finally persuaded a somewhat reluctant collector to buy it.

In his article ‘Good Art, Bad People’, Charles McGrath concludes that ‘the cruel thing about art – of great art anyway – is that it requires its practitioners to be wrapped up in themselves in a way that’s a little inhuman.’ Understandably you may need to be a little inhuman to create, as Picasso did, at least fifty thousand pieces of art in your lifetime. Amongst them are more acknowledged masterpieces than any other artist in history has even come close to achieving.

Despite being generally considered a bullying misogynist, he is also revered as one of the most significant artists to have ever lived, a true genius alongside the great masters. Picasso was a child prodigy and in 1897 at the age of fifteen he had created the extraordinary Science and Charity. After that, his work would take a radical turn, leaving traditional painting to fall by the wayside – a thing of the past.

Picasso was a man who was both loved and reviled by women. Like a Spanish bull in a corrida, he attracted female matadors to enter the spectacle in an attempt to tame the wild beast. Time and again they would be broken by Picasso’s infidelity.

He spent between 1904 and 1912 with his first love, Fernande Olivier. She met Picasso under the threatening skies of a storm and as she rushed to find shelter, he stood in front of her and held out a kitten. Picasso and Olivier began living together and that same summer of 1904 they both began to experiment with opium. As a couple they were frequently unfaithful to each other. Occasionally Olivier’s infidelity made Picasso so overwrought with jealousy that he would lock her in his studio when he left. Years later, Picasso confessed that one of the figures in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was based on Olivier herself.

Between 1927 and 1936 Picasso was having a secret affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, who gave birth to their daughter Maia, but by this time Picasso’s affections had already drifted towards another woman, Dora Maar, the subject of many of his intoxicating portraits. Marie-Thèrèse finally ended up hanging herself. Picasso first spotted Dora in the Café aux Deux Magots in Paris, frenetically stabbing a knife between her fingers as fast as possible, until blood dotted her gloved hands. Picasso requested to keep her bloodstained gloves as a souvenir of their first encounter.

‘For me,’ Picasso said, ‘she’s the weeping woman. For years I’ve painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism and not with pleasure, either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me. It was the deep reality, not the superficial one.’

Following her relationship with Picasso she underwent extensive treatment in a psychiatric hospital.  After a severe nervous breakdown, she sank into years of depression and isolation – to only be recognised as the sitter in so many of Picasso’s most powerful, and anguished portraits, admired in museums across the world.   

In 1943, Picasso told his then lover Françoise Gilot, ‘Women are machines for suffering.’ In the early days of their nine-year affair, the artist who was sixty-one at the time warned the young twenty-one-year-old woman: ‘For me there are only two kinds of women, goddesses and doormats.’

At first, Gilot had refused to succumb to Picasso’s desire to play a game of cat and mouse, and made no pretence of resisting his advances. Picasso was taken aback. ‘How do you expect me to seduce anyone under conditions like that? If you’re not going to resist – well, then, it’s out of the question. I’ll have to think it over.’ He quickly succumbed to her charms, and she became his adored mistress.

Even so, due to his uncontrollable infidelity, Gilot eventually left Picasso and went on to publish her book Life with Picasso, which sold over one million copies. The publication of Gilot’s memoirs enraged Picasso and he quickly severed all ties with her. He also dispassionately revoked their children’s inheritance.

The woman with whom Picasso was to live out his last days was Jacqueline Roque; they met when she was twenty-seven and he was seventy. Picasso pursued Roque by bringing her a single red rose every day, composing love poems for her, and by drawing a giant dove in white chalk on the wall of her house. She became his second wife in 1961, and during the last seventeen years of his life, the only woman he painted was Roque. When Picasso was buried, Roque lay over his grave and slept there all night in the snow. She was also to eventually commit suicide.

Although the tempestuous relationships between Picasso and his many women were at many times disturbing, the experiences they shared are inextricably linked to the masterpieces he created.

For Picasso ‘one must act in painting as in life, directly.’ All he asked in his last words was: ‘drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink anymore.’