#art, Talking About Art, chapter 3: Fernande Olivier

CHAPTER 3
Fernande Olivier

I would consider Fernande Olivier to be the first woman, or first real relationship in Picasso’s life. He met her in Paris while living at the now famous Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre. This apartment building was baptised with the name Bateau Lavoir by Picasso and his cronies in 1904. They thought that its wooden structure made it look like the laundry boats moored on the River Seine. The name stuck with all the other artists, poets and members of the bohemian crowd prevalent in those years, mostly composed of young artists, very idealists and equally as poor.

In any event, Fernande, besides being Picasso’s first Parisian romance, was a model who also aspired to be an artist herself. She was born in Paris in 1881 and she did write her memoirs about her life with Picasso. The couple took up residence at the Bateau Lavoir in 1905. Their relationship lasted approximately seven years and it was not an easy-going relationship at all. Both of them were of the jealous type and given to bursts of violence.

One could say that she was the muse that inspired some of his phenomenal early works, including the sculpture, Head of a Woman (1909). It might have been Fernande who catapulted him into his rose period. And she might have also been one of the prostitutes painted in his seminal work Las Señoritas de Aviñón. All in all, she was the model for over fifty paintings from those early years in Paris.

Yet, Picasso was moving on. By 1911, after having become a successful artist, Picasso began to consider her a reminder of harder times and lost interest in her. He left her and in 1912 found a new woman, a new muse, lover, obsession, whom he called ma jolie and whose name was Eva Guel. Eva was born in 1885, and probably, like Fernande, also in Paris. Eva was quite the opposite of Fernande. She was a petite woman of fine chiselled features and of mild temperament. However, the relationship was not to last as ma jolie succumbed to either cancer or tuberculosis and died in 1915. She was his inspiration, one could suppose, for the cubist period where in some of his work he wrote “ma jolie”.

Picasso was very distraught by the death of Eva. He even said to Gertrude Stein that his life was hell. Yet, although ma jolie, the love of his life, his petite Eva, was sick and dying, Picasso was already shopping around for a replacement. By autumn of 1915 he had already met, and had a romantic interlude with, Gabrielle Lapeyre, and with several other young, beautiful women, including with Emilienne Pâquerette, the most sought after model of the time. This all happened between 1915 and 1917.

Even though I have stated that Fernande Olivier was Picasso’s first romance, to speak of, there had been others in Paris before Fernande. However, they were short-lived affairs mostly and really, with perhaps one exception that I will explain, had little to do with influencing the art of the great master.

The exception, in my opinion was Germaine Gargallo, née Laure Antoine, who later became Germaine Pichot, born in Paris in 1880. She had been the girlfriend of Carles Casagemas, Catalan artist and poet, good friend of Pablo Picasso, who committed suicide in France in 1901. Immediately following the death of Casagemas Germaina starts an affair with Picasso. In his painting Los dos saltimbanquis the two figures might just well be either him and Germaine or Germaine and Casagemas. That is the sum total, in my opinion, of Germaine’s influence in the emerging art of Picasso.

Other women did form part of his life between 1900 and 1904, mostly art models. There was a model named Madeleine in early 1904 who might have become pregnant with Picasso’s child but who aborted. She could have been the model for a 1904 gouache on pulp board painting titled Woman with a Helmet of Hair, which is now in the Art Institute of Chicago.

The next chapter will deal with a very important woman in Picasso’s life, Olga Kochlova. She would be his first wife and the woman who guided him into the realm of the rich and powerful, something that would turn his world around.

CHEERS