Art Of The Day Weekly

#465 - from 23 March 2017 to 29 March 2017


Auguste Rodin, The Thinker, large model, SNBA, 1904, weathered plaster; 182 x 108 x 141 cm. Paris, musée Rodin, donation Rodin, 1916 © Musée Rodin (photo Christian Baraja).

EXHIBITIONS

Olga, Picasso’s damned soul

PARIS – We all know her as being Picasso’s first wife. Certainly not his first companion as the artist from Andalusia was rather precocious in that field. The Spanish painter met the dancer from the Ballets russes, Olga Kokhlova (1889-1955), in the winter of 1917 in Rome. He had gone with Cocteau to work on the decors of a ballet, Parade, which was to be presented by Diaghilev a few months later in Paris. The love story was very brief – a few years at the most. As of 1921, set up in a bourgeois comfort of rue La Boétie, the father of a small boy, Picasso suffocated near this woman who was uprooted and whose family, back in Russia, was caught in the horrors of the Revolution. She had abandoned dance for him. The exhibition shows how the muse of the beginning, who inspired an Ingres-like vein and then a neo-classic one, slowly transformed into a frightening, castrating companion – his portraits of her are reduced to a ferocious face with sharp teeth. Picasso delved in other relations, first with Dora Maar, then with Marie-Thérèse, with whom he had another child, born in 1931, and definitely left her in 1935. Olga was crushed by this marital failure and slipped into deep nostalgia, wrote Picasso almost every day of her life, and slowly died over a twenty-year period.
Olga Picasso at the Musée Picasso, from 21 March to 3 September 2017. Catalogue Gallimard, 312 p, 39 €.

Know more

Read the full Newsletter