Picasso's women

MORE than any other painter, Pablo Picasso personifies the history of 20th-century art.

Born in Andalusia in 1881, the Spanish genius moved to Paris in 1900. He was in the forefront of every artistic movement symbolism, realism, cubism and surrealism which marked the first half of our century.

Picasso's work was in many ways a collection of the people he encountered. Over his long career, bordello madams, landladies, art dealers, poet friends, his children and especially his lovers became Picasso's models. Although he is also known for sculptures, still lifes and large murals like the Spanish civil war Guernica and the revolutionary Demoiselles d'Avignon, the portrait was Picasso's favourite genre.

So it is not surprising that France's main artistic event this season, Picasso and the Portrait at the Grand Palais in Paris (until January 20th), is above all a visual record of the women whom the intense Spaniard chose to pose for him. The exhibition was organised by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and contains more than 150 paintings, drawings and engravings. It provides a unique opportunity to see in one place masterpieces from private collections, from museums in Barcelona, St Petersburg and London, as well as New York and Paris.

Madeleine was one of Picasso s first mistresses in Paris. Art historians no longer know the family name of this slender woman, whom he painted in his blue and pink periods. Her angular face was always solemn and strangely poetic. In a 1905 oil portrait, a seated, nude Madeleine sits staring into space, her body melting into planes of pale yellow and burnt sienna. As he often did, Picasso left the background un-finished.

The more voluptuous Fernande supplanted Madeleine in 1906. The influence of African art can be seen in one of Picasso's first cubist paintings, a geometric rendition of Fernande holding a fan, in earth colours, from 1908.

Then Picasso met dancer Olga Khokhlova in Rome in 1917, while he was designing sets for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets russes. They married in 1918 and their son Paulo was born three years later. Picasso's portraits of Olga and Paulo are perhaps the most beautiful of all his paintings. Photographs show Olga was a rather ordinary, slavic-looking woman. But his paintings romanticised her, giving her either the sculptural weight of classic Greek and Roman art or, with a floral shawl, the exoticism of a Spanish lady.

Two portraits of Olga were chosen as the theme paintings for the exhibition. In one, a large, luminous pastel and charcoal portrait done in 1921, the year of their son's birth, Olga is radiant, serene. In The Seated Bather, painted nine years later, Olga has become a disjointed, abstracted assemblage of body parts on a cliff above the sea. One can't help wondering what she felt when her husband began painting her face as a tiny triangle with two dots for eyes and vertical, nearly interlocking zig-zags in lieu of a jaw. Yet the painting, in blue, beige and grey, has a kind of gracefulness. Olga's arm clutches one knee while her other leg curls beneath her. No matter how abstracted, Picasso's paintings almost always remained representational.

The periods of Picasso's love life, like the periods of his artistic style, often overlapped. In 1926 he met Marie-Therese Walter, the blonde muse who gave him a daughter, Maya, in 1935.

Picasso painted Marie-Therese in gentle curves, with seeming cheery tenderness. Not so her arch rival, the photographer Dora Maar, whom he met in 1935 - an eventful year, since he also divorced Olga.

THE portraits of Dora Maar contrast sharply with those of Marie-Therese. The Woman Crying, painted of Dora in 1937, is a powerful representation of a hysterical sobbing fit. In two paintings done on the same day, with his models lying on the same sofa and bearing the same title - Woman Lying Down with a Book - Picasso divulged his bigamous life with Marie-Therese and Dora. Marie-Therese is soft and passive. Dora, the reflection of Picasso's anxieties, is jagged, violent, almost reptilian.

When Picasso met Francoise Gilot in 1943, he told her that she had the spirit of a plant in springtime". He became obsessed with the theme and often painted Francoise like a flowering plant, her body a long stem, her breasts and abundant hair like petals.

Francoise gave birth to Claude in 1947 and Paloma in 1949. As with Paulo and Maya before, Picasso expressed love for his children by painting their portraits.

If love can be measured by longevity, Picasso's last love was his best love. He was already 71 when he met Jacqueline Rogue, who became his second wife in 1961. Jacqueline stayed with him for 20 years, until his death in 1973. He usually painted the dark-haired, high-cheekboned Jacqueline in modern, cubist style. as if from several angles at the same time. But Picasso's occasional reversion to his early realism produced exquisite portraits, including Jacqueline with a Black Scarf (1954).