Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier (Hardcover)

by Fernande Olivier (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Fernande Olivier was Picasso's first great love. Happily for us, she had a lively writing style and a keen eye for detail. Illustrated with more than 80 contemporary photographs and paintings, Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier is a compulsively readable account of the quarrels, escapades, pleasures, and privations of the young artist and his circle between 1905 and 1912. The two met when Olivier was working as an artist's model, having escaped a loveless childhood and a disastrous early marriage. This book smoothly melds retranslated material from her 1933 memoir (Picasso et ses amis) with the posthumously published Souvenirs intimes and selections from her correspondence, including her plaintive letters to Alice B. Toklas during a lonely holiday with Picasso in rural Spain.

Honest to the point of bluntness, Olivier--whom Picasso eventually abandoned for Eva Gouel, a younger, more passive friend of hers--sums up her lover as a workaholic, an impulse buyer (when he had cash) of bric-a- brac and good furniture, a contrarian who found charm in wearing peculiar outfits and pretending he had no taste, and a jealous lover who often kept her locked up when he went out. She describes their home, the Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre, as "a weird, squalid building echoing from morning to night with every kind of noise: discussion, singing, shouting, calling, the sound of buckets used to empty the toilet clattering noisily on the floor ... doors slammed, suggestive moaning coming through the closed doors of the studios."

As Picasso biographer John Richardson relates in an afterword, Olivier never rebounded from her rejection by Picasso. Her middle years were dogged by faithless lovers, financial woes, and Gertrude Stein's deviousness (agreeing to help Olivier publish her memoirs, Stein instead wrote her own version of the era). --Cathy Curtis

From Publishers Weekly
Model and sometime diction teacher Olivier (1881-1966) lived with Picasso for nine years. Their passionate and contentious relationship, begun during his Blue and Rose periods, deteriorated and finally imploded as cubism built up steam. In the late 1920s, after fending for herself for nearly 20 years, the free-spirited and straight-talking Olivier (n‚e Am‚lie Lang) wrote an unsparing, crackling memoir of their high bohemian lives together, serializing it in Le Soir in 1930 and provoking Picasso's fury. It is published here for the first time in English, interspersed among Olivier's copious journal entries, and further supplemented with letters, and with annotations, notes and 82 illustrations (10 in color) selected by Marilyn McCully (Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay). Beginning with journal entries chronicling her whim-based "downfall" and marriage to an abuser at 18, her life as a model in and around the Ecole des Beaux Arts and further venturings, Olivier finally meets (on page 137) "the Spanish painter who lives in our building" ("I don't find him particularly attractive"), who turns out to be Picasso and they immediately take up with each other. Olivier's prosaic proto-postfeminism yields a page-turning perspective on a woman who vigilantly maintained her own identity, even as it was formed in relation to men, including friends from Apollinaire to Max Jacob, and by other famous friends like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. In an epilogue, distinguished Picasso biographer John Richardson convincingly speculates that this memoir, published complete in French in 1933 but entrusted to Stein for American publication earlier, may have inspired The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. With its charming flaws (some, like reflexive anti-Semitism, less so) and guileless presentation, it's easy to see why. (May)Forecast: Attractively produced and carefully edited, this book will be a serious beach read for the art set and beyond, and its plethora of intrigue will draw in those who flip through it on a display table. Expect sales on the order of The Diary of Frieda Kahlo.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 296 pages
• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams (May 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810942518
• ISBN-13: 978-0810942516
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #530,831 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Challenging Life!, November 9, 2001

By	Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

Loving Picasso is a book that will touch your heart, and my moisten your eyes.

When we visit a museum and see wonderful paintings of striking women, seldom do we think about the conditions under which the art was created. Did the artists and the model have a relationship? If so, what was it? Did they have enough to eat while the work was done? Were they considerate of one another? Was the studio warm or cold? What was the model thinking about as she posed? How had the woman come to model? And so on.

I will never look at another painting or sculpture again of a human model without being filled with such questions, as a result of reaching about the life of Fernande Olivier from her private journal, letters, and memoir as presented in Loving Picasso.

This beautiful, charming woman lived an extremely difficult life. It was so challenging that few could have emerged from such awful circumstances without being distorted in mind and personality. Yet, Ms. Olivier seems to have avoided both, and been a light in the life of her many male admirers, female friends, and an inspiration to Picasso in his most innovative years.

From the book's title, you will think that the material is mostly about the years when Ms. Olivier and Picasso lived together, but that's only about half the book. The book is really an autobiography through the time when the two split up for the final time in 1912.

Readers will be rewarded with many intriguing views of the lives of "starving" artists in Paris, the many distinguished friends of Picasso and Ms. Olivier, and how Picasso changed as he went from an unknown to one of the recognized leaders of avant-garde art along with Matisse.

Having read about Picasso's troubled relationships with other women, I was surprised to see that his relationship with Ms. Olivier was one of the most pleasant and productive connections he had in his life. Certainly, he often chose her as a model for his work, and we will always see her as the young person she was then. Many other details in here will either surprise or shock you about Picasso, and expand your understanding of his creative methods and personality.

One of the most charming parts of the book can be found in the many images of places where she lived, the people she knew, the paintings and sculptures for which she was the model, and her own drawings.

For those who have enjoyed Gertrude Stein's, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, you will probably be interested to know that Ms. Olivier's writing is considered to be a more accurate and complete version of many of the same events. In fact, there is an interesting view of Ms. Stein's apparent efforts to keep Ms. Olivier's writing away from an American audience to preserve the market for Ms. Stein's own writing on this subject.

After you finish this rewarding memoir of a most unique person, I suggest that you think about what the purpose of life is. That's a question with which Ms. Olivier had trouble coming to grips.

Follow your purpose!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Picasso and__________. Relationships absurd as his art!, July 17, 2001

By	"puppypokey" (Northcountry) - See all my reviews

This is the third Picasso and ____ book I've read. There are likely more, but the others I've seen are Picasso and Dora (his mistress in the late forties and Life with Picassoby Francoise Gilot who had his attention in his later years.

This book along with the others read like a three part trilogy - this latest one covering the earliest relationship. The book is very good and seems to be honest. Quite readable.

This book should be on the reading list of anyone interested in probing what the heck Picasso was about. Note that he does not get any less difficult in his relationships!! This book is fantastic to see that Picasso is as childish and monstrous in his early relationships as he is in his later ones!

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars some people are just crazy, June 17, 2001

By A Customer

This book is about Fernande Olivier, Picasso's lover during his formative years as an artist. It's about a relationship based on control -- Picasso won't let Fernande have shoes so she won't be able to leave the house. This book is extremely interesting but you can't help being astonished by how naive and foolish Fernande is.