Hidden Portraits: Six Women Who Shaped Picasso's Life

Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque. These six extraordinary women loved and inspired Pablo Picasso. They frequently appear as the women in his portraits, but they also pursued their own ambitions in dance, writing, painting, and more. Each transformed Picasso’s life and work—and he theirs. Yet they have long been dismissed as simply passive models or muses.

In a groundbreaking and deeply researched account, acclaimed author Sue Roe brings to light the true stories of the women in Picasso’s life. Using recently discovered source material and hitherto overlooked firsthand accounts, Roe positions each woman not as a footnote in Picasso’s biography, but center stage, from their own point of view.

All six lived remarkable, unconventional lives on their own terms. Each was tested not only by the subterfuges and betrayals of the art world’s most notorious womanizer, but also by the wider social turbulence of their time. Hidden Portraits traces each woman’s story across nearly a century, from bohemian early-twentieth-century Montmartre to the glittering Riviera in the 1920s, from Paris under Nazi occupation to Picasso’s death, and beyond. Roe unearths the ways these women influenced every stage of Picasso’s work, from his sketches to masterpieces like Guernica.

Under her eye, we recognize Fernande in the early Rose Period paintings; Olga draped across an armchair; Marie-Thérèse asleep in a painting of a woman dreaming; Dora in Picasso’s weeping women; Françoise in his paintings of domestic life; Jacqueline as the raven-haired figure frequenting his late-in-life drawings.

Spanning seventy years and traveling between the cafés of Paris and the Côte d’Azur, Roe reclaims a set of brilliant women, and in the process rewrites a vital chapter in the history of modern art.