Olivier Widmaier Picasso

Olivier Widmaier Picasso is one of Pablo Picasso's many grandchildren, as he is the son of Picasso's second child Maya, who was born to Marie-Thérèse Walter. Despite his close connection to the 20th century's most influential artist he was only aware of his grandfather's passing on the day of his death on April 8, 1973. Olivier was a small child at that time, and although Pablo loved his children and grandchildren dearly he was too ill at the end of his life to be able to spend much time with them. His mother had distanced himself from Pablo as well, which provided further space away from him.

Despite these distances from his children, grandchildren and former lovers Pablo was an immense and overshadowing presence on all of their lives, both while he was alive and in the immediate years after his death. Olivier, in an effort to learn more about his famous grandfather and to address the rumors and misinformation about him that was published, talked to his mother, other relatives and close friends of the artist, in order to understand him as a man, and what he meant to his family.

The book is divided into chapters: Women, Politics, Family, Money, Death and Eternity. Olivier provides details about the women who were most important to him, most notably his grandmother Marie-Thérèse, his at times shameful treatment of them, and how he used them as inspiration for his development as an artist. He implicitly demonstrates that he would have been a forgotten bourgeois artist had he stayed with his first wife Olga Khokhlova, although she provided him initially with a stable home environment in which to work; Marie-Thérèse was an essential element of his annus mirabilis of 1932, when he broke through a fog of increasing irrelevance and torpor and regained his creative energy; and Dora Maar was critical to his development as a political artist and to the creation of his most famous work, Gurernica. Olivier also reveals the trauma that some of the women, Olga and Dora in particular, experienced due to Pablo's infidelity and mistreatment of them, which carried over to his four children by three different partners.

The book is filled with photos of Pablo's works, and especially ones of his home and family. Despite his dalliances Olivier portrays his grandfather as a more traditional man that one would expect, who loved children and family traditions. The most compelling chapters to me were the first three, as I had much less interest in details about Pablo's children and grandchildren and details about his finances.

I purchased Picasso: An Intimate Portrait during the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2018, just before I attended a talk about the artist that featured its author and another who wrote a book about Guernica. This book is an excellent and balanced addition to the works written about Picasso, which provided me with a greater understanding of and appreciation for his work, and helped me view him more favorably as a man, albeit a flawed and unfaithful one.… (mehr)