Picasso in Paris
Fifty years after the death of the iconic artist, exhibitions across Paris reflect on his work...
February 1, 2023
2023 marks fifty years since the death of Pablo Picasso, the proud Spaniard who practised predominantly in France. His artistic legacy will be the subject of roughly fifty commemorative exhibitions, promoted and supported by a special bi-national commission of the Spanish and French governments.
Picasso’s collection in Paris is concentrated in the Hôtel Salé, a private mansion mash-up of modern and classical architecture. A haven from the busy shopping streets of the 4th arrondissement, it hosts over five thousand works and tens of thousands of archived pieces, along with a series of rotating exhibitions.
Farah Atassi, named for the Franco-Belgian artist of Syrian origin, is populated with works created specifically for the exhibition. His influence is clear, but the feminist undertones of Atassi’s practice are felt most through contemporary rereadings of Picasso’s art. The most compelling comparisons come in the final room, where we see her drawing from the artist’s early cubism in the late 1910s.
Down in the basement, Pierre Moignard muses on the latter part of Picasso’s life. His composite painting and film, ‘F for P’ (2013-2014), draws from Orson Welles’ docudrama F for Fake (1973), and self-portraits drawn between 1972 and 1973, just before Picasso’s death. In part, it seeks to interrogate Picasso’s infamous assertion: ‘Art is a lie we use to reveal the truth’. But Moignard’s attempt at a freeze frame, ‘stopping the action in the year 1973’, speaks as much to the Parisian Impressionists of the previous century, a bid to capture a moment in time.
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Picture Picasso leaves Paris, immersing the viewer in his studio at La Californie, Cannes, where he practised from 1955 to 1961. Self-conscious films of the artist sketching, fag in hand, and the chair he used as a palette throughout his life, give a sense of Picasso’s curated persona. But best of all, the exhibition lingers on the role of Jacqueline Picasso (Roque), whom he met in 1952, and married in 1961. They would stay together until the artist’s death, Jacqueline a vital companion, caregiver, and source of inspiration.
Often overlooked, the role of women is also the subject of Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, nestled in another backstreet, in the city’s eighteenth arrondissement. The Musée de Montmartre is the oldest house in the region, which has played home and studio to its proud artistic exports: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Émile Bernard, Suzanne Valadon, and Pere (Julian) Tanguy.
Curated as hyperlocalism incarnate, its permanent collection boasts of its infamous Le Chat Noir and the Moulin Rouge. But Fernande Olivier, the first exhibition to this ‘forgotten woman’, offers something more powerful – the voice of a witness of bohemian, modern Montmartre.
A model and the first muse of Pablo Picasso, Fernande Olivier was also an avid writer. ‘I lived through their existences,’ she speaks of the Parisian avant-garde who circulated around his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. (Performance and orientalism are shushed undercurrents in both institutions, from ‘playful’ archive photographs of the Picassos, to the influence of Japanese kabuki theatre on cabaret.)
Olivier turned to diary writing during her traumatic childhood; unrecognised and neglected, she was subject to rape and forced marriage. In 1900, she changed her name and declared her own date of birth – by that time, aged nineteen. French and English captions describe her as a ‘femme de tête’; here translated as headstrong, but the more literal ‘woman of head’ better captures her intelligence, education, and ability.
After moving to the Bateau-Lavoir in 1901, she soon met Picasso, with whom she shared a relationship until 1912. Olivier supported and documented the artist as he struggled through some of his most infamous works, highlighting the dual role of women as both artists and muses, creators and caregivers. Fernande Olivier features a remarkable number of Picassos – a curatorial triumph – and she’s there through it all, from his Rose Period to primitivism, sculpture to cubism. ‘He’s constantly doing portraits of me,’ she writes, a personal detail that makes their falling out of love, or his temporary obsession, even harder to stomach.
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Its curation is considered and progressive, a world away from the permanent collection that proclaims that ‘even a woman’, like Louise Michel, might participate in the Paris Commune. Beyond its title, the exhibition begins and concludes with the cursive signature of Fernande Olivier - the name she chose for herself.
Archive letters (mainly to other women), quotations, and audio clips allow us to hear her in her own words. We only see her as others saw her, in photographs and paintings, save for one sketched self-portrait. (But first, before the avant-garde, we get works by the feminist artist Agnès Thurnauer which speak to her childhood and adolescent experiences.)
Women are everywhere as subjects, but scarcely as artists – save for Marie Laurencin and Suzanne Valadon – and that’s the point. Olivier writes of the ‘Picasso Gang’ as a ‘continuous procession of Spaniards’, and men, like Matisse, Derain, and Rousseau. Her personal diaries sometimes read like gossip – Maurice de Vlaminck’s family ‘so poor that he often had to go home at night on foot’ - but they still provide insightful details.
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Olivier’s testimonies are echoed in the written and visual accounts of Roland Dorgelès and Kees Van Dongen. That shouldn’t prevent more critical engagement with their context. In need of money after their separation, Olivier first sought to publish her book, Souvenirs Intimes, in 1933. But Picasso continually suppressed their publication, paying her one million francs a year from 1957 not to release her writing. Another, Picasso Et Ses Amis, and articles painting more pictures of the artist, were permitted instead.
The power to choose how others perceived him – to be seen as he wished to be seen - was a right permitted to the artist, and not his muse. Souvenir Intimes wouldn’t be published in French until 1988, after both of their deaths; and in English, as Loving Picasso, in 2001.
Of these four exhibitions, Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso is the most insightful, offering fresh perspectives on well-known histories, from the perspective of an individual woman. Its part in this semicentennial is, in itself, a powerful marker of Olivier’s role in Picasso’s art, art history, and continued iconisation today.
All exhibitions are currently on show at the Musée National Picasso-Paris.
Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, in the Intimacy of the Bateau-Lavoir is on show at the Musée de Montmartre until 19 February 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
2023 marks fifty years since the death of Pablo Picasso, the proud Spaniard who practised predominantly in France. His artistic legacy will be the subject of roughly fifty commemorative exhibitions, promoted and supported by a special bi-national commission of the Spanish and French governments.
Picasso’s collection in Paris is concentrated in the Hôtel Salé, a private mansion mash-up of modern and classical architecture. A haven from the busy shopping streets of the 4th arrondissement, it hosts over five thousand works and tens of thousands of archived pieces, along with a series of rotating exhibitions.
Farah Atassi, named for the Franco-Belgian artist of Syrian origin, is populated with works created specifically for the exhibition. His influence is clear, but the feminist undertones of Atassi’s practice are felt most through contemporary rereadings of Picasso’s art. The most compelling comparisons come in the final room, where we see her drawing from the artist’s early cubism in the late 1910s.
Down in the basement, Pierre Moignard muses on the latter part of Picasso’s life. His composite painting and film, ‘F for P’ (2013-2014), draws from Orson Welles’ docudrama F for Fake (1973), and self-portraits drawn between 1972 and 1973, just before Picasso’s death. In part, it seeks to interrogate Picasso’s infamous assertion: ‘Art is a lie we use to reveal the truth’. But Moignard’s attempt at a freeze frame, ‘stopping the action in the year 1973’, speaks as much to the Parisian Impressionists of the previous century, a bid to capture a moment in time.
Picture Picasso leaves Paris, immersing the viewer in his studio at La Californie, Cannes, where he practised from 1955 to 1961. Self-conscious films of the artist sketching, fag in hand, and the chair he used as a palette throughout his life, give a sense of Picasso’s curated persona. But best of all, the exhibition lingers on the role of Jacqueline Picasso (Roque), whom he met in 1952, and married in 1961. They would stay together until the artist’s death, Jacqueline a vital companion, caregiver, and source of inspiration.
Often overlooked, the role of women is also the subject of Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, nestled in another backstreet, in the city’s eighteenth arrondissement. The Musée de Montmartre is the oldest house in the region, which has played home and studio to its proud artistic exports: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Émile Bernard, Suzanne Valadon, and Pere (Julian) Tanguy.
Curated as hyperlocalism incarnate, its permanent collection boasts of its infamous Le Chat Noir and the Moulin Rouge. But Fernande Olivier, the first exhibition to this ‘forgotten woman’, offers something more powerful – the voice of a witness of bohemian, modern Montmartre.
A model and the first muse of Pablo Picasso, Fernande Olivier was also an avid writer. ‘I lived through their existences,’ she speaks of the Parisian avant-garde who circulated around his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. (Performance and orientalism are shushed undercurrents in both institutions, from ‘playful’ archive photographs of the Picassos, to the influence of Japanese kabuki theatre on cabaret.)
Olivier turned to diary writing during her traumatic childhood; unrecognised and neglected, she was subject to rape and forced marriage. In 1900, she changed her name and declared her own date of birth – by that time, aged nineteen. French and English captions describe her as a ‘femme de tête’; here translated as headstrong, but the more literal ‘woman of head’ better captures her intelligence, education, and ability.
After moving to the Bateau-Lavoir in 1901, she soon met Picasso, with whom she shared a relationship until 1912. Olivier supported and documented the artist as he struggled through some of his most infamous works, highlighting the dual role of women as both artists and muses, creators and caregivers. Fernande Olivier features a remarkable number of Picassos – a curatorial triumph – and she’s there through it all, from his Rose Period to primitivism, sculpture to cubism. ‘He’s constantly doing portraits of me,’ she writes, a personal detail that makes their falling out of love, or his temporary obsession, even harder to stomach.
Its curation is considered and progressive, a world away from the permanent collection that proclaims that ‘even a woman’, like Louise Michel, might participate in the Paris Commune. Beyond its title, the exhibition begins and concludes with the cursive signature of Fernande Olivier - the name she chose for herself.
Archive letters (mainly to other women), quotations, and audio clips allow us to hear her in her own words. We only see her as others saw her, in photographs and paintings, save for one sketched self-portrait. (But first, before the avant-garde, we get works by the feminist artist Agnès Thurnauer which speak to her childhood and adolescent experiences.)
Women are everywhere as subjects, but scarcely as artists – save for Marie Laurencin and Suzanne Valadon – and that’s the point. Olivier writes of the ‘Picasso Gang’ as a ‘continuous procession of Spaniards’, and men, like Matisse, Derain, and Rousseau. Her personal diaries sometimes read like gossip – Maurice de Vlaminck’s family ‘so poor that he often had to go home at night on foot’ - but they still provide insightful details.
Olivier’s testimonies are echoed in the written and visual accounts of Roland Dorgelès and Kees Van Dongen. That shouldn’t prevent more critical engagement with their context. In need of money after their separation, Olivier first sought to publish her book, Souvenirs Intimes, in 1933. But Picasso continually suppressed their publication, paying her one million francs a year from 1957 not to release her writing. Another, Picasso Et Ses Amis, and articles painting more pictures of the artist, were permitted instead.
The power to choose how others perceived him – to be seen as he wished to be seen - was a right permitted to the artist, and not his muse. Souvenir Intimes wouldn’t be published in French until 1988, after both of their deaths; and in English, as Loving Picasso, in 2001.
Of these four exhibitions, Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso is the most insightful, offering fresh perspectives on well-known histories, from the perspective of an individual woman. Its part in this semicentennial is, in itself, a powerful marker of Olivier’s role in Picasso’s art, art history, and continued iconisation today.
All exhibitions are currently on show at the Musée National Picasso-Paris.
Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, in the Intimacy of the Bateau-Lavoir is on show at the Musée de Montmartre until 19 February 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
2023 marks fifty years since the death of Pablo Picasso, the proud Spaniard who practised predominantly in France. His artistic legacy will be the subject of roughly fifty commemorative exhibitions, promoted and supported by a special bi-national commission of the Spanish and French governments.
Picasso’s collection in Paris is concentrated in the Hôtel Salé, a private mansion mash-up of modern and classical architecture. A haven from the busy shopping streets of the 4th arrondissement, it hosts over five thousand works and tens of thousands of archived pieces, along with a series of rotating exhibitions.
Farah Atassi, named for the Franco-Belgian artist of Syrian origin, is populated with works created specifically for the exhibition. His influence is clear, but the feminist undertones of Atassi’s practice are felt most through contemporary rereadings of Picasso’s art. The most compelling comparisons come in the final room, where we see her drawing from the artist’s early cubism in the late 1910s.
Down in the basement, Pierre Moignard muses on the latter part of Picasso’s life. His composite painting and film, ‘F for P’ (2013-2014), draws from Orson Welles’ docudrama F for Fake (1973), and self-portraits drawn between 1972 and 1973, just before Picasso’s death. In part, it seeks to interrogate Picasso’s infamous assertion: ‘Art is a lie we use to reveal the truth’. But Moignard’s attempt at a freeze frame, ‘stopping the action in the year 1973’, speaks as much to the Parisian Impressionists of the previous century, a bid to capture a moment in time.
Picture Picasso leaves Paris, immersing the viewer in his studio at La Californie, Cannes, where he practised from 1955 to 1961. Self-conscious films of the artist sketching, fag in hand, and the chair he used as a palette throughout his life, give a sense of Picasso’s curated persona. But best of all, the exhibition lingers on the role of Jacqueline Picasso (Roque), whom he met in 1952, and married in 1961. They would stay together until the artist’s death, Jacqueline a vital companion, caregiver, and source of inspiration.
Often overlooked, the role of women is also the subject of Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, nestled in another backstreet, in the city’s eighteenth arrondissement. The Musée de Montmartre is the oldest house in the region, which has played home and studio to its proud artistic exports: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Émile Bernard, Suzanne Valadon, and Pere (Julian) Tanguy.
Curated as hyperlocalism incarnate, its permanent collection boasts of its infamous Le Chat Noir and the Moulin Rouge. But Fernande Olivier, the first exhibition to this ‘forgotten woman’, offers something more powerful – the voice of a witness of bohemian, modern Montmartre.
A model and the first muse of Pablo Picasso, Fernande Olivier was also an avid writer. ‘I lived through their existences,’ she speaks of the Parisian avant-garde who circulated around his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. (Performance and orientalism are shushed undercurrents in both institutions, from ‘playful’ archive photographs of the Picassos, to the influence of Japanese kabuki theatre on cabaret.)
Olivier turned to diary writing during her traumatic childhood; unrecognised and neglected, she was subject to rape and forced marriage. In 1900, she changed her name and declared her own date of birth – by that time, aged nineteen. French and English captions describe her as a ‘femme de tête’; here translated as headstrong, but the more literal ‘woman of head’ better captures her intelligence, education, and ability.
After moving to the Bateau-Lavoir in 1901, she soon met Picasso, with whom she shared a relationship until 1912. Olivier supported and documented the artist as he struggled through some of his most infamous works, highlighting the dual role of women as both artists and muses, creators and caregivers. Fernande Olivier features a remarkable number of Picassos – a curatorial triumph – and she’s there through it all, from his Rose Period to primitivism, sculpture to cubism. ‘He’s constantly doing portraits of me,’ she writes, a personal detail that makes their falling out of love, or his temporary obsession, even harder to stomach.
Its curation is considered and progressive, a world away from the permanent collection that proclaims that ‘even a woman’, like Louise Michel, might participate in the Paris Commune. Beyond its title, the exhibition begins and concludes with the cursive signature of Fernande Olivier - the name she chose for herself.
Archive letters (mainly to other women), quotations, and audio clips allow us to hear her in her own words. We only see her as others saw her, in photographs and paintings, save for one sketched self-portrait. (But first, before the avant-garde, we get works by the feminist artist Agnès Thurnauer which speak to her childhood and adolescent experiences.)
Women are everywhere as subjects, but scarcely as artists – save for Marie Laurencin and Suzanne Valadon – and that’s the point. Olivier writes of the ‘Picasso Gang’ as a ‘continuous procession of Spaniards’, and men, like Matisse, Derain, and Rousseau. Her personal diaries sometimes read like gossip – Maurice de Vlaminck’s family ‘so poor that he often had to go home at night on foot’ - but they still provide insightful details.
Olivier’s testimonies are echoed in the written and visual accounts of Roland Dorgelès and Kees Van Dongen. That shouldn’t prevent more critical engagement with their context. In need of money after their separation, Olivier first sought to publish her book, Souvenirs Intimes, in 1933. But Picasso continually suppressed their publication, paying her one million francs a year from 1957 not to release her writing. Another, Picasso Et Ses Amis, and articles painting more pictures of the artist, were permitted instead.
The power to choose how others perceived him – to be seen as he wished to be seen - was a right permitted to the artist, and not his muse. Souvenir Intimes wouldn’t be published in French until 1988, after both of their deaths; and in English, as Loving Picasso, in 2001.
Of these four exhibitions, Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso is the most insightful, offering fresh perspectives on well-known histories, from the perspective of an individual woman. Its part in this semicentennial is, in itself, a powerful marker of Olivier’s role in Picasso’s art, art history, and continued iconisation today.
All exhibitions are currently on show at the Musée National Picasso-Paris.
Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, in the Intimacy of the Bateau-Lavoir is on show at the Musée de Montmartre until 19 February 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
2023 marks fifty years since the death of Pablo Picasso, the proud Spaniard who practised predominantly in France. His artistic legacy will be the subject of roughly fifty commemorative exhibitions, promoted and supported by a special bi-national commission of the Spanish and French governments.
Picasso’s collection in Paris is concentrated in the Hôtel Salé, a private mansion mash-up of modern and classical architecture. A haven from the busy shopping streets of the 4th arrondissement, it hosts over five thousand works and tens of thousands of archived pieces, along with a series of rotating exhibitions.
Farah Atassi, named for the Franco-Belgian artist of Syrian origin, is populated with works created specifically for the exhibition. His influence is clear, but the feminist undertones of Atassi’s practice are felt most through contemporary rereadings of Picasso’s art. The most compelling comparisons come in the final room, where we see her drawing from the artist’s early cubism in the late 1910s.
Down in the basement, Pierre Moignard muses on the latter part of Picasso’s life. His composite painting and film, ‘F for P’ (2013-2014), draws from Orson Welles’ docudrama F for Fake (1973), and self-portraits drawn between 1972 and 1973, just before Picasso’s death. In part, it seeks to interrogate Picasso’s infamous assertion: ‘Art is a lie we use to reveal the truth’. But Moignard’s attempt at a freeze frame, ‘stopping the action in the year 1973’, speaks as much to the Parisian Impressionists of the previous century, a bid to capture a moment in time.
Picture Picasso leaves Paris, immersing the viewer in his studio at La Californie, Cannes, where he practised from 1955 to 1961. Self-conscious films of the artist sketching, fag in hand, and the chair he used as a palette throughout his life, give a sense of Picasso’s curated persona. But best of all, the exhibition lingers on the role of Jacqueline Picasso (Roque), whom he met in 1952, and married in 1961. They would stay together until the artist’s death, Jacqueline a vital companion, caregiver, and source of inspiration.
Often overlooked, the role of women is also the subject of Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, nestled in another backstreet, in the city’s eighteenth arrondissement. The Musée de Montmartre is the oldest house in the region, which has played home and studio to its proud artistic exports: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Émile Bernard, Suzanne Valadon, and Pere (Julian) Tanguy.
Curated as hyperlocalism incarnate, its permanent collection boasts of its infamous Le Chat Noir and the Moulin Rouge. But Fernande Olivier, the first exhibition to this ‘forgotten woman’, offers something more powerful – the voice of a witness of bohemian, modern Montmartre.
A model and the first muse of Pablo Picasso, Fernande Olivier was also an avid writer. ‘I lived through their existences,’ she speaks of the Parisian avant-garde who circulated around his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. (Performance and orientalism are shushed undercurrents in both institutions, from ‘playful’ archive photographs of the Picassos, to the influence of Japanese kabuki theatre on cabaret.)
Olivier turned to diary writing during her traumatic childhood; unrecognised and neglected, she was subject to rape and forced marriage. In 1900, she changed her name and declared her own date of birth – by that time, aged nineteen. French and English captions describe her as a ‘femme de tête’; here translated as headstrong, but the more literal ‘woman of head’ better captures her intelligence, education, and ability.
After moving to the Bateau-Lavoir in 1901, she soon met Picasso, with whom she shared a relationship until 1912. Olivier supported and documented the artist as he struggled through some of his most infamous works, highlighting the dual role of women as both artists and muses, creators and caregivers. Fernande Olivier features a remarkable number of Picassos – a curatorial triumph – and she’s there through it all, from his Rose Period to primitivism, sculpture to cubism. ‘He’s constantly doing portraits of me,’ she writes, a personal detail that makes their falling out of love, or his temporary obsession, even harder to stomach.
Its curation is considered and progressive, a world away from the permanent collection that proclaims that ‘even a woman’, like Louise Michel, might participate in the Paris Commune. Beyond its title, the exhibition begins and concludes with the cursive signature of Fernande Olivier - the name she chose for herself.
Archive letters (mainly to other women), quotations, and audio clips allow us to hear her in her own words. We only see her as others saw her, in photographs and paintings, save for one sketched self-portrait. (But first, before the avant-garde, we get works by the feminist artist Agnès Thurnauer which speak to her childhood and adolescent experiences.)
Women are everywhere as subjects, but scarcely as artists – save for Marie Laurencin and Suzanne Valadon – and that’s the point. Olivier writes of the ‘Picasso Gang’ as a ‘continuous procession of Spaniards’, and men, like Matisse, Derain, and Rousseau. Her personal diaries sometimes read like gossip – Maurice de Vlaminck’s family ‘so poor that he often had to go home at night on foot’ - but they still provide insightful details.
Olivier’s testimonies are echoed in the written and visual accounts of Roland Dorgelès and Kees Van Dongen. That shouldn’t prevent more critical engagement with their context. In need of money after their separation, Olivier first sought to publish her book, Souvenirs Intimes, in 1933. But Picasso continually suppressed their publication, paying her one million francs a year from 1957 not to release her writing. Another, Picasso Et Ses Amis, and articles painting more pictures of the artist, were permitted instead.
The power to choose how others perceived him – to be seen as he wished to be seen - was a right permitted to the artist, and not his muse. Souvenir Intimes wouldn’t be published in French until 1988, after both of their deaths; and in English, as Loving Picasso, in 2001.
Of these four exhibitions, Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso is the most insightful, offering fresh perspectives on well-known histories, from the perspective of an individual woman. Its part in this semicentennial is, in itself, a powerful marker of Olivier’s role in Picasso’s art, art history, and continued iconisation today.
All exhibitions are currently on show at the Musée National Picasso-Paris.
Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, in the Intimacy of the Bateau-Lavoir is on show at the Musée de Montmartre until 19 February 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
2023 marks fifty years since the death of Pablo Picasso, the proud Spaniard who practised predominantly in France. His artistic legacy will be the subject of roughly fifty commemorative exhibitions, promoted and supported by a special bi-national commission of the Spanish and French governments.
Picasso’s collection in Paris is concentrated in the Hôtel Salé, a private mansion mash-up of modern and classical architecture. A haven from the busy shopping streets of the 4th arrondissement, it hosts over five thousand works and tens of thousands of archived pieces, along with a series of rotating exhibitions.
Farah Atassi, named for the Franco-Belgian artist of Syrian origin, is populated with works created specifically for the exhibition. His influence is clear, but the feminist undertones of Atassi’s practice are felt most through contemporary rereadings of Picasso’s art. The most compelling comparisons come in the final room, where we see her drawing from the artist’s early cubism in the late 1910s.
Down in the basement, Pierre Moignard muses on the latter part of Picasso’s life. His composite painting and film, ‘F for P’ (2013-2014), draws from Orson Welles’ docudrama F for Fake (1973), and self-portraits drawn between 1972 and 1973, just before Picasso’s death. In part, it seeks to interrogate Picasso’s infamous assertion: ‘Art is a lie we use to reveal the truth’. But Moignard’s attempt at a freeze frame, ‘stopping the action in the year 1973’, speaks as much to the Parisian Impressionists of the previous century, a bid to capture a moment in time.
Picture Picasso leaves Paris, immersing the viewer in his studio at La Californie, Cannes, where he practised from 1955 to 1961. Self-conscious films of the artist sketching, fag in hand, and the chair he used as a palette throughout his life, give a sense of Picasso’s curated persona. But best of all, the exhibition lingers on the role of Jacqueline Picasso (Roque), whom he met in 1952, and married in 1961. They would stay together until the artist’s death, Jacqueline a vital companion, caregiver, and source of inspiration.
Often overlooked, the role of women is also the subject of Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, nestled in another backstreet, in the city’s eighteenth arrondissement. The Musée de Montmartre is the oldest house in the region, which has played home and studio to its proud artistic exports: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Émile Bernard, Suzanne Valadon, and Pere (Julian) Tanguy.
Curated as hyperlocalism incarnate, its permanent collection boasts of its infamous Le Chat Noir and the Moulin Rouge. But Fernande Olivier, the first exhibition to this ‘forgotten woman’, offers something more powerful – the voice of a witness of bohemian, modern Montmartre.
A model and the first muse of Pablo Picasso, Fernande Olivier was also an avid writer. ‘I lived through their existences,’ she speaks of the Parisian avant-garde who circulated around his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. (Performance and orientalism are shushed undercurrents in both institutions, from ‘playful’ archive photographs of the Picassos, to the influence of Japanese kabuki theatre on cabaret.)
Olivier turned to diary writing during her traumatic childhood; unrecognised and neglected, she was subject to rape and forced marriage. In 1900, she changed her name and declared her own date of birth – by that time, aged nineteen. French and English captions describe her as a ‘femme de tête’; here translated as headstrong, but the more literal ‘woman of head’ better captures her intelligence, education, and ability.
After moving to the Bateau-Lavoir in 1901, she soon met Picasso, with whom she shared a relationship until 1912. Olivier supported and documented the artist as he struggled through some of his most infamous works, highlighting the dual role of women as both artists and muses, creators and caregivers. Fernande Olivier features a remarkable number of Picassos – a curatorial triumph – and she’s there through it all, from his Rose Period to primitivism, sculpture to cubism. ‘He’s constantly doing portraits of me,’ she writes, a personal detail that makes their falling out of love, or his temporary obsession, even harder to stomach.
Its curation is considered and progressive, a world away from the permanent collection that proclaims that ‘even a woman’, like Louise Michel, might participate in the Paris Commune. Beyond its title, the exhibition begins and concludes with the cursive signature of Fernande Olivier - the name she chose for herself.
Archive letters (mainly to other women), quotations, and audio clips allow us to hear her in her own words. We only see her as others saw her, in photographs and paintings, save for one sketched self-portrait. (But first, before the avant-garde, we get works by the feminist artist Agnès Thurnauer which speak to her childhood and adolescent experiences.)
Women are everywhere as subjects, but scarcely as artists – save for Marie Laurencin and Suzanne Valadon – and that’s the point. Olivier writes of the ‘Picasso Gang’ as a ‘continuous procession of Spaniards’, and men, like Matisse, Derain, and Rousseau. Her personal diaries sometimes read like gossip – Maurice de Vlaminck’s family ‘so poor that he often had to go home at night on foot’ - but they still provide insightful details.
Olivier’s testimonies are echoed in the written and visual accounts of Roland Dorgelès and Kees Van Dongen. That shouldn’t prevent more critical engagement with their context. In need of money after their separation, Olivier first sought to publish her book, Souvenirs Intimes, in 1933. But Picasso continually suppressed their publication, paying her one million francs a year from 1957 not to release her writing. Another, Picasso Et Ses Amis, and articles painting more pictures of the artist, were permitted instead.
The power to choose how others perceived him – to be seen as he wished to be seen - was a right permitted to the artist, and not his muse. Souvenir Intimes wouldn’t be published in French until 1988, after both of their deaths; and in English, as Loving Picasso, in 2001.
Of these four exhibitions, Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso is the most insightful, offering fresh perspectives on well-known histories, from the perspective of an individual woman. Its part in this semicentennial is, in itself, a powerful marker of Olivier’s role in Picasso’s art, art history, and continued iconisation today.
All exhibitions are currently on show at the Musée National Picasso-Paris.
Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, in the Intimacy of the Bateau-Lavoir is on show at the Musée de Montmartre until 19 February 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
2023 marks fifty years since the death of Pablo Picasso, the proud Spaniard who practised predominantly in France. His artistic legacy will be the subject of roughly fifty commemorative exhibitions, promoted and supported by a special bi-national commission of the Spanish and French governments.
Picasso’s collection in Paris is concentrated in the Hôtel Salé, a private mansion mash-up of modern and classical architecture. A haven from the busy shopping streets of the 4th arrondissement, it hosts over five thousand works and tens of thousands of archived pieces, along with a series of rotating exhibitions.
Farah Atassi, named for the Franco-Belgian artist of Syrian origin, is populated with works created specifically for the exhibition. His influence is clear, but the feminist undertones of Atassi’s practice are felt most through contemporary rereadings of Picasso’s art. The most compelling comparisons come in the final room, where we see her drawing from the artist’s early cubism in the late 1910s.
Down in the basement, Pierre Moignard muses on the latter part of Picasso’s life. His composite painting and film, ‘F for P’ (2013-2014), draws from Orson Welles’ docudrama F for Fake (1973), and self-portraits drawn between 1972 and 1973, just before Picasso’s death. In part, it seeks to interrogate Picasso’s infamous assertion: ‘Art is a lie we use to reveal the truth’. But Moignard’s attempt at a freeze frame, ‘stopping the action in the year 1973’, speaks as much to the Parisian Impressionists of the previous century, a bid to capture a moment in time.
Picture Picasso leaves Paris, immersing the viewer in his studio at La Californie, Cannes, where he practised from 1955 to 1961. Self-conscious films of the artist sketching, fag in hand, and the chair he used as a palette throughout his life, give a sense of Picasso’s curated persona. But best of all, the exhibition lingers on the role of Jacqueline Picasso (Roque), whom he met in 1952, and married in 1961. They would stay together until the artist’s death, Jacqueline a vital companion, caregiver, and source of inspiration.
Often overlooked, the role of women is also the subject of Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, nestled in another backstreet, in the city’s eighteenth arrondissement. The Musée de Montmartre is the oldest house in the region, which has played home and studio to its proud artistic exports: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Émile Bernard, Suzanne Valadon, and Pere (Julian) Tanguy.
Curated as hyperlocalism incarnate, its permanent collection boasts of its infamous Le Chat Noir and the Moulin Rouge. But Fernande Olivier, the first exhibition to this ‘forgotten woman’, offers something more powerful – the voice of a witness of bohemian, modern Montmartre.
A model and the first muse of Pablo Picasso, Fernande Olivier was also an avid writer. ‘I lived through their existences,’ she speaks of the Parisian avant-garde who circulated around his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. (Performance and orientalism are shushed undercurrents in both institutions, from ‘playful’ archive photographs of the Picassos, to the influence of Japanese kabuki theatre on cabaret.)
Olivier turned to diary writing during her traumatic childhood; unrecognised and neglected, she was subject to rape and forced marriage. In 1900, she changed her name and declared her own date of birth – by that time, aged nineteen. French and English captions describe her as a ‘femme de tête’; here translated as headstrong, but the more literal ‘woman of head’ better captures her intelligence, education, and ability.
After moving to the Bateau-Lavoir in 1901, she soon met Picasso, with whom she shared a relationship until 1912. Olivier supported and documented the artist as he struggled through some of his most infamous works, highlighting the dual role of women as both artists and muses, creators and caregivers. Fernande Olivier features a remarkable number of Picassos – a curatorial triumph – and she’s there through it all, from his Rose Period to primitivism, sculpture to cubism. ‘He’s constantly doing portraits of me,’ she writes, a personal detail that makes their falling out of love, or his temporary obsession, even harder to stomach.
Its curation is considered and progressive, a world away from the permanent collection that proclaims that ‘even a woman’, like Louise Michel, might participate in the Paris Commune. Beyond its title, the exhibition begins and concludes with the cursive signature of Fernande Olivier - the name she chose for herself.
Archive letters (mainly to other women), quotations, and audio clips allow us to hear her in her own words. We only see her as others saw her, in photographs and paintings, save for one sketched self-portrait. (But first, before the avant-garde, we get works by the feminist artist Agnès Thurnauer which speak to her childhood and adolescent experiences.)
Women are everywhere as subjects, but scarcely as artists – save for Marie Laurencin and Suzanne Valadon – and that’s the point. Olivier writes of the ‘Picasso Gang’ as a ‘continuous procession of Spaniards’, and men, like Matisse, Derain, and Rousseau. Her personal diaries sometimes read like gossip – Maurice de Vlaminck’s family ‘so poor that he often had to go home at night on foot’ - but they still provide insightful details.
Olivier’s testimonies are echoed in the written and visual accounts of Roland Dorgelès and Kees Van Dongen. That shouldn’t prevent more critical engagement with their context. In need of money after their separation, Olivier first sought to publish her book, Souvenirs Intimes, in 1933. But Picasso continually suppressed their publication, paying her one million francs a year from 1957 not to release her writing. Another, Picasso Et Ses Amis, and articles painting more pictures of the artist, were permitted instead.
The power to choose how others perceived him – to be seen as he wished to be seen - was a right permitted to the artist, and not his muse. Souvenir Intimes wouldn’t be published in French until 1988, after both of their deaths; and in English, as Loving Picasso, in 2001.
Of these four exhibitions, Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso is the most insightful, offering fresh perspectives on well-known histories, from the perspective of an individual woman. Its part in this semicentennial is, in itself, a powerful marker of Olivier’s role in Picasso’s art, art history, and continued iconisation today.
All exhibitions are currently on show at the Musée National Picasso-Paris.
Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, in the Intimacy of the Bateau-Lavoir is on show at the Musée de Montmartre until 19 February 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
2023 marks fifty years since the death of Pablo Picasso, the proud Spaniard who practised predominantly in France. His artistic legacy will be the subject of roughly fifty commemorative exhibitions, promoted and supported by a special bi-national commission of the Spanish and French governments.
Picasso’s collection in Paris is concentrated in the Hôtel Salé, a private mansion mash-up of modern and classical architecture. A haven from the busy shopping streets of the 4th arrondissement, it hosts over five thousand works and tens of thousands of archived pieces, along with a series of rotating exhibitions.
Farah Atassi, named for the Franco-Belgian artist of Syrian origin, is populated with works created specifically for the exhibition. His influence is clear, but the feminist undertones of Atassi’s practice are felt most through contemporary rereadings of Picasso’s art. The most compelling comparisons come in the final room, where we see her drawing from the artist’s early cubism in the late 1910s.
Down in the basement, Pierre Moignard muses on the latter part of Picasso’s life. His composite painting and film, ‘F for P’ (2013-2014), draws from Orson Welles’ docudrama F for Fake (1973), and self-portraits drawn between 1972 and 1973, just before Picasso’s death. In part, it seeks to interrogate Picasso’s infamous assertion: ‘Art is a lie we use to reveal the truth’. But Moignard’s attempt at a freeze frame, ‘stopping the action in the year 1973’, speaks as much to the Parisian Impressionists of the previous century, a bid to capture a moment in time.
Picture Picasso leaves Paris, immersing the viewer in his studio at La Californie, Cannes, where he practised from 1955 to 1961. Self-conscious films of the artist sketching, fag in hand, and the chair he used as a palette throughout his life, give a sense of Picasso’s curated persona. But best of all, the exhibition lingers on the role of Jacqueline Picasso (Roque), whom he met in 1952, and married in 1961. They would stay together until the artist’s death, Jacqueline a vital companion, caregiver, and source of inspiration.
Often overlooked, the role of women is also the subject of Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, nestled in another backstreet, in the city’s eighteenth arrondissement. The Musée de Montmartre is the oldest house in the region, which has played home and studio to its proud artistic exports: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Émile Bernard, Suzanne Valadon, and Pere (Julian) Tanguy.
Curated as hyperlocalism incarnate, its permanent collection boasts of its infamous Le Chat Noir and the Moulin Rouge. But Fernande Olivier, the first exhibition to this ‘forgotten woman’, offers something more powerful – the voice of a witness of bohemian, modern Montmartre.
A model and the first muse of Pablo Picasso, Fernande Olivier was also an avid writer. ‘I lived through their existences,’ she speaks of the Parisian avant-garde who circulated around his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. (Performance and orientalism are shushed undercurrents in both institutions, from ‘playful’ archive photographs of the Picassos, to the influence of Japanese kabuki theatre on cabaret.)
Olivier turned to diary writing during her traumatic childhood; unrecognised and neglected, she was subject to rape and forced marriage. In 1900, she changed her name and declared her own date of birth – by that time, aged nineteen. French and English captions describe her as a ‘femme de tête’; here translated as headstrong, but the more literal ‘woman of head’ better captures her intelligence, education, and ability.
After moving to the Bateau-Lavoir in 1901, she soon met Picasso, with whom she shared a relationship until 1912. Olivier supported and documented the artist as he struggled through some of his most infamous works, highlighting the dual role of women as both artists and muses, creators and caregivers. Fernande Olivier features a remarkable number of Picassos – a curatorial triumph – and she’s there through it all, from his Rose Period to primitivism, sculpture to cubism. ‘He’s constantly doing portraits of me,’ she writes, a personal detail that makes their falling out of love, or his temporary obsession, even harder to stomach.
Its curation is considered and progressive, a world away from the permanent collection that proclaims that ‘even a woman’, like Louise Michel, might participate in the Paris Commune. Beyond its title, the exhibition begins and concludes with the cursive signature of Fernande Olivier - the name she chose for herself.
Archive letters (mainly to other women), quotations, and audio clips allow us to hear her in her own words. We only see her as others saw her, in photographs and paintings, save for one sketched self-portrait. (But first, before the avant-garde, we get works by the feminist artist Agnès Thurnauer which speak to her childhood and adolescent experiences.)
Women are everywhere as subjects, but scarcely as artists – save for Marie Laurencin and Suzanne Valadon – and that’s the point. Olivier writes of the ‘Picasso Gang’ as a ‘continuous procession of Spaniards’, and men, like Matisse, Derain, and Rousseau. Her personal diaries sometimes read like gossip – Maurice de Vlaminck’s family ‘so poor that he often had to go home at night on foot’ - but they still provide insightful details.
Olivier’s testimonies are echoed in the written and visual accounts of Roland Dorgelès and Kees Van Dongen. That shouldn’t prevent more critical engagement with their context. In need of money after their separation, Olivier first sought to publish her book, Souvenirs Intimes, in 1933. But Picasso continually suppressed their publication, paying her one million francs a year from 1957 not to release her writing. Another, Picasso Et Ses Amis, and articles painting more pictures of the artist, were permitted instead.
The power to choose how others perceived him – to be seen as he wished to be seen - was a right permitted to the artist, and not his muse. Souvenir Intimes wouldn’t be published in French until 1988, after both of their deaths; and in English, as Loving Picasso, in 2001.
Of these four exhibitions, Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso is the most insightful, offering fresh perspectives on well-known histories, from the perspective of an individual woman. Its part in this semicentennial is, in itself, a powerful marker of Olivier’s role in Picasso’s art, art history, and continued iconisation today.
All exhibitions are currently on show at the Musée National Picasso-Paris.
Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, in the Intimacy of the Bateau-Lavoir is on show at the Musée de Montmartre until 19 February 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
2023 marks fifty years since the death of Pablo Picasso, the proud Spaniard who practised predominantly in France. His artistic legacy will be the subject of roughly fifty commemorative exhibitions, promoted and supported by a special bi-national commission of the Spanish and French governments.
Picasso’s collection in Paris is concentrated in the Hôtel Salé, a private mansion mash-up of modern and classical architecture. A haven from the busy shopping streets of the 4th arrondissement, it hosts over five thousand works and tens of thousands of archived pieces, along with a series of rotating exhibitions.
Farah Atassi, named for the Franco-Belgian artist of Syrian origin, is populated with works created specifically for the exhibition. His influence is clear, but the feminist undertones of Atassi’s practice are felt most through contemporary rereadings of Picasso’s art. The most compelling comparisons come in the final room, where we see her drawing from the artist’s early cubism in the late 1910s.
Down in the basement, Pierre Moignard muses on the latter part of Picasso’s life. His composite painting and film, ‘F for P’ (2013-2014), draws from Orson Welles’ docudrama F for Fake (1973), and self-portraits drawn between 1972 and 1973, just before Picasso’s death. In part, it seeks to interrogate Picasso’s infamous assertion: ‘Art is a lie we use to reveal the truth’. But Moignard’s attempt at a freeze frame, ‘stopping the action in the year 1973’, speaks as much to the Parisian Impressionists of the previous century, a bid to capture a moment in time.
Picture Picasso leaves Paris, immersing the viewer in his studio at La Californie, Cannes, where he practised from 1955 to 1961. Self-conscious films of the artist sketching, fag in hand, and the chair he used as a palette throughout his life, give a sense of Picasso’s curated persona. But best of all, the exhibition lingers on the role of Jacqueline Picasso (Roque), whom he met in 1952, and married in 1961. They would stay together until the artist’s death, Jacqueline a vital companion, caregiver, and source of inspiration.
Often overlooked, the role of women is also the subject of Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, nestled in another backstreet, in the city’s eighteenth arrondissement. The Musée de Montmartre is the oldest house in the region, which has played home and studio to its proud artistic exports: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Émile Bernard, Suzanne Valadon, and Pere (Julian) Tanguy.
Curated as hyperlocalism incarnate, its permanent collection boasts of its infamous Le Chat Noir and the Moulin Rouge. But Fernande Olivier, the first exhibition to this ‘forgotten woman’, offers something more powerful – the voice of a witness of bohemian, modern Montmartre.
A model and the first muse of Pablo Picasso, Fernande Olivier was also an avid writer. ‘I lived through their existences,’ she speaks of the Parisian avant-garde who circulated around his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. (Performance and orientalism are shushed undercurrents in both institutions, from ‘playful’ archive photographs of the Picassos, to the influence of Japanese kabuki theatre on cabaret.)
Olivier turned to diary writing during her traumatic childhood; unrecognised and neglected, she was subject to rape and forced marriage. In 1900, she changed her name and declared her own date of birth – by that time, aged nineteen. French and English captions describe her as a ‘femme de tête’; here translated as headstrong, but the more literal ‘woman of head’ better captures her intelligence, education, and ability.
After moving to the Bateau-Lavoir in 1901, she soon met Picasso, with whom she shared a relationship until 1912. Olivier supported and documented the artist as he struggled through some of his most infamous works, highlighting the dual role of women as both artists and muses, creators and caregivers. Fernande Olivier features a remarkable number of Picassos – a curatorial triumph – and she’s there through it all, from his Rose Period to primitivism, sculpture to cubism. ‘He’s constantly doing portraits of me,’ she writes, a personal detail that makes their falling out of love, or his temporary obsession, even harder to stomach.
Its curation is considered and progressive, a world away from the permanent collection that proclaims that ‘even a woman’, like Louise Michel, might participate in the Paris Commune. Beyond its title, the exhibition begins and concludes with the cursive signature of Fernande Olivier - the name she chose for herself.
Archive letters (mainly to other women), quotations, and audio clips allow us to hear her in her own words. We only see her as others saw her, in photographs and paintings, save for one sketched self-portrait. (But first, before the avant-garde, we get works by the feminist artist Agnès Thurnauer which speak to her childhood and adolescent experiences.)
Women are everywhere as subjects, but scarcely as artists – save for Marie Laurencin and Suzanne Valadon – and that’s the point. Olivier writes of the ‘Picasso Gang’ as a ‘continuous procession of Spaniards’, and men, like Matisse, Derain, and Rousseau. Her personal diaries sometimes read like gossip – Maurice de Vlaminck’s family ‘so poor that he often had to go home at night on foot’ - but they still provide insightful details.
Olivier’s testimonies are echoed in the written and visual accounts of Roland Dorgelès and Kees Van Dongen. That shouldn’t prevent more critical engagement with their context. In need of money after their separation, Olivier first sought to publish her book, Souvenirs Intimes, in 1933. But Picasso continually suppressed their publication, paying her one million francs a year from 1957 not to release her writing. Another, Picasso Et Ses Amis, and articles painting more pictures of the artist, were permitted instead.
The power to choose how others perceived him – to be seen as he wished to be seen - was a right permitted to the artist, and not his muse. Souvenir Intimes wouldn’t be published in French until 1988, after both of their deaths; and in English, as Loving Picasso, in 2001.
Of these four exhibitions, Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso is the most insightful, offering fresh perspectives on well-known histories, from the perspective of an individual woman. Its part in this semicentennial is, in itself, a powerful marker of Olivier’s role in Picasso’s art, art history, and continued iconisation today.
All exhibitions are currently on show at the Musée National Picasso-Paris.
Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, in the Intimacy of the Bateau-Lavoir is on show at the Musée de Montmartre until 19 February 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
2023 marks fifty years since the death of Pablo Picasso, the proud Spaniard who practised predominantly in France. His artistic legacy will be the subject of roughly fifty commemorative exhibitions, promoted and supported by a special bi-national commission of the Spanish and French governments.
Picasso’s collection in Paris is concentrated in the Hôtel Salé, a private mansion mash-up of modern and classical architecture. A haven from the busy shopping streets of the 4th arrondissement, it hosts over five thousand works and tens of thousands of archived pieces, along with a series of rotating exhibitions.
Farah Atassi, named for the Franco-Belgian artist of Syrian origin, is populated with works created specifically for the exhibition. His influence is clear, but the feminist undertones of Atassi’s practice are felt most through contemporary rereadings of Picasso’s art. The most compelling comparisons come in the final room, where we see her drawing from the artist’s early cubism in the late 1910s.
Down in the basement, Pierre Moignard muses on the latter part of Picasso’s life. His composite painting and film, ‘F for P’ (2013-2014), draws from Orson Welles’ docudrama F for Fake (1973), and self-portraits drawn between 1972 and 1973, just before Picasso’s death. In part, it seeks to interrogate Picasso’s infamous assertion: ‘Art is a lie we use to reveal the truth’. But Moignard’s attempt at a freeze frame, ‘stopping the action in the year 1973’, speaks as much to the Parisian Impressionists of the previous century, a bid to capture a moment in time.
Picture Picasso leaves Paris, immersing the viewer in his studio at La Californie, Cannes, where he practised from 1955 to 1961. Self-conscious films of the artist sketching, fag in hand, and the chair he used as a palette throughout his life, give a sense of Picasso’s curated persona. But best of all, the exhibition lingers on the role of Jacqueline Picasso (Roque), whom he met in 1952, and married in 1961. They would stay together until the artist’s death, Jacqueline a vital companion, caregiver, and source of inspiration.
Often overlooked, the role of women is also the subject of Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, nestled in another backstreet, in the city’s eighteenth arrondissement. The Musée de Montmartre is the oldest house in the region, which has played home and studio to its proud artistic exports: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Émile Bernard, Suzanne Valadon, and Pere (Julian) Tanguy.
Curated as hyperlocalism incarnate, its permanent collection boasts of its infamous Le Chat Noir and the Moulin Rouge. But Fernande Olivier, the first exhibition to this ‘forgotten woman’, offers something more powerful – the voice of a witness of bohemian, modern Montmartre.
A model and the first muse of Pablo Picasso, Fernande Olivier was also an avid writer. ‘I lived through their existences,’ she speaks of the Parisian avant-garde who circulated around his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. (Performance and orientalism are shushed undercurrents in both institutions, from ‘playful’ archive photographs of the Picassos, to the influence of Japanese kabuki theatre on cabaret.)
Olivier turned to diary writing during her traumatic childhood; unrecognised and neglected, she was subject to rape and forced marriage. In 1900, she changed her name and declared her own date of birth – by that time, aged nineteen. French and English captions describe her as a ‘femme de tête’; here translated as headstrong, but the more literal ‘woman of head’ better captures her intelligence, education, and ability.
After moving to the Bateau-Lavoir in 1901, she soon met Picasso, with whom she shared a relationship until 1912. Olivier supported and documented the artist as he struggled through some of his most infamous works, highlighting the dual role of women as both artists and muses, creators and caregivers. Fernande Olivier features a remarkable number of Picassos – a curatorial triumph – and she’s there through it all, from his Rose Period to primitivism, sculpture to cubism. ‘He’s constantly doing portraits of me,’ she writes, a personal detail that makes their falling out of love, or his temporary obsession, even harder to stomach.
Its curation is considered and progressive, a world away from the permanent collection that proclaims that ‘even a woman’, like Louise Michel, might participate in the Paris Commune. Beyond its title, the exhibition begins and concludes with the cursive signature of Fernande Olivier - the name she chose for herself.
Archive letters (mainly to other women), quotations, and audio clips allow us to hear her in her own words. We only see her as others saw her, in photographs and paintings, save for one sketched self-portrait. (But first, before the avant-garde, we get works by the feminist artist Agnès Thurnauer which speak to her childhood and adolescent experiences.)
Women are everywhere as subjects, but scarcely as artists – save for Marie Laurencin and Suzanne Valadon – and that’s the point. Olivier writes of the ‘Picasso Gang’ as a ‘continuous procession of Spaniards’, and men, like Matisse, Derain, and Rousseau. Her personal diaries sometimes read like gossip – Maurice de Vlaminck’s family ‘so poor that he often had to go home at night on foot’ - but they still provide insightful details.
Olivier’s testimonies are echoed in the written and visual accounts of Roland Dorgelès and Kees Van Dongen. That shouldn’t prevent more critical engagement with their context. In need of money after their separation, Olivier first sought to publish her book, Souvenirs Intimes, in 1933. But Picasso continually suppressed their publication, paying her one million francs a year from 1957 not to release her writing. Another, Picasso Et Ses Amis, and articles painting more pictures of the artist, were permitted instead.
The power to choose how others perceived him – to be seen as he wished to be seen - was a right permitted to the artist, and not his muse. Souvenir Intimes wouldn’t be published in French until 1988, after both of their deaths; and in English, as Loving Picasso, in 2001.
Of these four exhibitions, Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso is the most insightful, offering fresh perspectives on well-known histories, from the perspective of an individual woman. Its part in this semicentennial is, in itself, a powerful marker of Olivier’s role in Picasso’s art, art history, and continued iconisation today.
All exhibitions are currently on show at the Musée National Picasso-Paris.
Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, in the Intimacy of the Bateau-Lavoir is on show at the Musée de Montmartre until 19 February 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
2023 marks fifty years since the death of Pablo Picasso, the proud Spaniard who practised predominantly in France. His artistic legacy will be the subject of roughly fifty commemorative exhibitions, promoted and supported by a special bi-national commission of the Spanish and French governments.
Picasso’s collection in Paris is concentrated in the Hôtel Salé, a private mansion mash-up of modern and classical architecture. A haven from the busy shopping streets of the 4th arrondissement, it hosts over five thousand works and tens of thousands of archived pieces, along with a series of rotating exhibitions.
Farah Atassi, named for the Franco-Belgian artist of Syrian origin, is populated with works created specifically for the exhibition. His influence is clear, but the feminist undertones of Atassi’s practice are felt most through contemporary rereadings of Picasso’s art. The most compelling comparisons come in the final room, where we see her drawing from the artist’s early cubism in the late 1910s.
Down in the basement, Pierre Moignard muses on the latter part of Picasso’s life. His composite painting and film, ‘F for P’ (2013-2014), draws from Orson Welles’ docudrama F for Fake (1973), and self-portraits drawn between 1972 and 1973, just before Picasso’s death. In part, it seeks to interrogate Picasso’s infamous assertion: ‘Art is a lie we use to reveal the truth’. But Moignard’s attempt at a freeze frame, ‘stopping the action in the year 1973’, speaks as much to the Parisian Impressionists of the previous century, a bid to capture a moment in time.
Picture Picasso leaves Paris, immersing the viewer in his studio at La Californie, Cannes, where he practised from 1955 to 1961. Self-conscious films of the artist sketching, fag in hand, and the chair he used as a palette throughout his life, give a sense of Picasso’s curated persona. But best of all, the exhibition lingers on the role of Jacqueline Picasso (Roque), whom he met in 1952, and married in 1961. They would stay together until the artist’s death, Jacqueline a vital companion, caregiver, and source of inspiration.
Often overlooked, the role of women is also the subject of Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, nestled in another backstreet, in the city’s eighteenth arrondissement. The Musée de Montmartre is the oldest house in the region, which has played home and studio to its proud artistic exports: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Émile Bernard, Suzanne Valadon, and Pere (Julian) Tanguy.
Curated as hyperlocalism incarnate, its permanent collection boasts of its infamous Le Chat Noir and the Moulin Rouge. But Fernande Olivier, the first exhibition to this ‘forgotten woman’, offers something more powerful – the voice of a witness of bohemian, modern Montmartre.
A model and the first muse of Pablo Picasso, Fernande Olivier was also an avid writer. ‘I lived through their existences,’ she speaks of the Parisian avant-garde who circulated around his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. (Performance and orientalism are shushed undercurrents in both institutions, from ‘playful’ archive photographs of the Picassos, to the influence of Japanese kabuki theatre on cabaret.)
Olivier turned to diary writing during her traumatic childhood; unrecognised and neglected, she was subject to rape and forced marriage. In 1900, she changed her name and declared her own date of birth – by that time, aged nineteen. French and English captions describe her as a ‘femme de tête’; here translated as headstrong, but the more literal ‘woman of head’ better captures her intelligence, education, and ability.
After moving to the Bateau-Lavoir in 1901, she soon met Picasso, with whom she shared a relationship until 1912. Olivier supported and documented the artist as he struggled through some of his most infamous works, highlighting the dual role of women as both artists and muses, creators and caregivers. Fernande Olivier features a remarkable number of Picassos – a curatorial triumph – and she’s there through it all, from his Rose Period to primitivism, sculpture to cubism. ‘He’s constantly doing portraits of me,’ she writes, a personal detail that makes their falling out of love, or his temporary obsession, even harder to stomach.
Its curation is considered and progressive, a world away from the permanent collection that proclaims that ‘even a woman’, like Louise Michel, might participate in the Paris Commune. Beyond its title, the exhibition begins and concludes with the cursive signature of Fernande Olivier - the name she chose for herself.
Archive letters (mainly to other women), quotations, and audio clips allow us to hear her in her own words. We only see her as others saw her, in photographs and paintings, save for one sketched self-portrait. (But first, before the avant-garde, we get works by the feminist artist Agnès Thurnauer which speak to her childhood and adolescent experiences.)
Women are everywhere as subjects, but scarcely as artists – save for Marie Laurencin and Suzanne Valadon – and that’s the point. Olivier writes of the ‘Picasso Gang’ as a ‘continuous procession of Spaniards’, and men, like Matisse, Derain, and Rousseau. Her personal diaries sometimes read like gossip – Maurice de Vlaminck’s family ‘so poor that he often had to go home at night on foot’ - but they still provide insightful details.
Olivier’s testimonies are echoed in the written and visual accounts of Roland Dorgelès and Kees Van Dongen. That shouldn’t prevent more critical engagement with their context. In need of money after their separation, Olivier first sought to publish her book, Souvenirs Intimes, in 1933. But Picasso continually suppressed their publication, paying her one million francs a year from 1957 not to release her writing. Another, Picasso Et Ses Amis, and articles painting more pictures of the artist, were permitted instead.
The power to choose how others perceived him – to be seen as he wished to be seen - was a right permitted to the artist, and not his muse. Souvenir Intimes wouldn’t be published in French until 1988, after both of their deaths; and in English, as Loving Picasso, in 2001.
Of these four exhibitions, Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso is the most insightful, offering fresh perspectives on well-known histories, from the perspective of an individual woman. Its part in this semicentennial is, in itself, a powerful marker of Olivier’s role in Picasso’s art, art history, and continued iconisation today.
All exhibitions are currently on show at the Musée National Picasso-Paris.
Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, in the Intimacy of the Bateau-Lavoir is on show at the Musée de Montmartre until 19 February 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
2023 marks fifty years since the death of Pablo Picasso, the proud Spaniard who practised predominantly in France. His artistic legacy will be the subject of roughly fifty commemorative exhibitions, promoted and supported by a special bi-national commission of the Spanish and French governments.
Picasso’s collection in Paris is concentrated in the Hôtel Salé, a private mansion mash-up of modern and classical architecture. A haven from the busy shopping streets of the 4th arrondissement, it hosts over five thousand works and tens of thousands of archived pieces, along with a series of rotating exhibitions.
Farah Atassi, named for the Franco-Belgian artist of Syrian origin, is populated with works created specifically for the exhibition. His influence is clear, but the feminist undertones of Atassi’s practice are felt most through contemporary rereadings of Picasso’s art. The most compelling comparisons come in the final room, where we see her drawing from the artist’s early cubism in the late 1910s.
Down in the basement, Pierre Moignard muses on the latter part of Picasso’s life. His composite painting and film, ‘F for P’ (2013-2014), draws from Orson Welles’ docudrama F for Fake (1973), and self-portraits drawn between 1972 and 1973, just before Picasso’s death. In part, it seeks to interrogate Picasso’s infamous assertion: ‘Art is a lie we use to reveal the truth’. But Moignard’s attempt at a freeze frame, ‘stopping the action in the year 1973’, speaks as much to the Parisian Impressionists of the previous century, a bid to capture a moment in time.
Picture Picasso leaves Paris, immersing the viewer in his studio at La Californie, Cannes, where he practised from 1955 to 1961. Self-conscious films of the artist sketching, fag in hand, and the chair he used as a palette throughout his life, give a sense of Picasso’s curated persona. But best of all, the exhibition lingers on the role of Jacqueline Picasso (Roque), whom he met in 1952, and married in 1961. They would stay together until the artist’s death, Jacqueline a vital companion, caregiver, and source of inspiration.
Often overlooked, the role of women is also the subject of Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, nestled in another backstreet, in the city’s eighteenth arrondissement. The Musée de Montmartre is the oldest house in the region, which has played home and studio to its proud artistic exports: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Émile Bernard, Suzanne Valadon, and Pere (Julian) Tanguy.
Curated as hyperlocalism incarnate, its permanent collection boasts of its infamous Le Chat Noir and the Moulin Rouge. But Fernande Olivier, the first exhibition to this ‘forgotten woman’, offers something more powerful – the voice of a witness of bohemian, modern Montmartre.
A model and the first muse of Pablo Picasso, Fernande Olivier was also an avid writer. ‘I lived through their existences,’ she speaks of the Parisian avant-garde who circulated around his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. (Performance and orientalism are shushed undercurrents in both institutions, from ‘playful’ archive photographs of the Picassos, to the influence of Japanese kabuki theatre on cabaret.)
Olivier turned to diary writing during her traumatic childhood; unrecognised and neglected, she was subject to rape and forced marriage. In 1900, she changed her name and declared her own date of birth – by that time, aged nineteen. French and English captions describe her as a ‘femme de tête’; here translated as headstrong, but the more literal ‘woman of head’ better captures her intelligence, education, and ability.
After moving to the Bateau-Lavoir in 1901, she soon met Picasso, with whom she shared a relationship until 1912. Olivier supported and documented the artist as he struggled through some of his most infamous works, highlighting the dual role of women as both artists and muses, creators and caregivers. Fernande Olivier features a remarkable number of Picassos – a curatorial triumph – and she’s there through it all, from his Rose Period to primitivism, sculpture to cubism. ‘He’s constantly doing portraits of me,’ she writes, a personal detail that makes their falling out of love, or his temporary obsession, even harder to stomach.
Its curation is considered and progressive, a world away from the permanent collection that proclaims that ‘even a woman’, like Louise Michel, might participate in the Paris Commune. Beyond its title, the exhibition begins and concludes with the cursive signature of Fernande Olivier - the name she chose for herself.
Archive letters (mainly to other women), quotations, and audio clips allow us to hear her in her own words. We only see her as others saw her, in photographs and paintings, save for one sketched self-portrait. (But first, before the avant-garde, we get works by the feminist artist Agnès Thurnauer which speak to her childhood and adolescent experiences.)
Women are everywhere as subjects, but scarcely as artists – save for Marie Laurencin and Suzanne Valadon – and that’s the point. Olivier writes of the ‘Picasso Gang’ as a ‘continuous procession of Spaniards’, and men, like Matisse, Derain, and Rousseau. Her personal diaries sometimes read like gossip – Maurice de Vlaminck’s family ‘so poor that he often had to go home at night on foot’ - but they still provide insightful details.
Olivier’s testimonies are echoed in the written and visual accounts of Roland Dorgelès and Kees Van Dongen. That shouldn’t prevent more critical engagement with their context. In need of money after their separation, Olivier first sought to publish her book, Souvenirs Intimes, in 1933. But Picasso continually suppressed their publication, paying her one million francs a year from 1957 not to release her writing. Another, Picasso Et Ses Amis, and articles painting more pictures of the artist, were permitted instead.
The power to choose how others perceived him – to be seen as he wished to be seen - was a right permitted to the artist, and not his muse. Souvenir Intimes wouldn’t be published in French until 1988, after both of their deaths; and in English, as Loving Picasso, in 2001.
Of these four exhibitions, Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso is the most insightful, offering fresh perspectives on well-known histories, from the perspective of an individual woman. Its part in this semicentennial is, in itself, a powerful marker of Olivier’s role in Picasso’s art, art history, and continued iconisation today.
All exhibitions are currently on show at the Musée National Picasso-Paris.
Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, in the Intimacy of the Bateau-Lavoir is on show at the Musée de Montmartre until 19 February 2023.
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