Pablo Picasso in love and war

The decade 1933-43 was one of busy erotic multi-tasking by the deft and diminutive Pablo Picasso. It took him the best part of ten years to effect a separation from the reluctant Olga Khokhlova, his ex-ballerina wife, retired injured from the Diaghilev Ballets Russes. Legal proceedings were triggered by her discovery of Picasso’s affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter (aged 17 when Picasso picked her up in 1927 outside the Galeries Lafayette). On 5 October 1935, Marie-Thérèse gave birth to Picasso’s daughter, Maria de la Concepción, later known as Maya. By then Picasso was fornicating on many fronts: with Alice Paalen, the wife of an Austrian painter, and the 49-year-old Valentine Hugo, an ex of André Breton. Picasso disencumbered himself of both relationships when he took up with Dora Maar (Henriette Théodora Markovitch), the half-Croatian, half-French surrealist photographer.

But he persisted with Marie-Thérèse contentedly and comfortably, setting up her and her sister and mother in the Villa Gerbier de Jonc in Royan, where he spent homely weekend rustications – escaping Dora’s jealous hysteria and subsequent self-reproach.