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Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier

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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!

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!

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.

Picasso is argublly the greatest artist of the 20th century, yet the fact that he was a horrible male-schovenist and a nutorius ego-centricist is often neglected by the society.

Women for Picasso were just tubes of paint. When used-up and dried, he simply had to thrown them away. The author had a 7 years affair with Picasso, and acted as his model exclusively, as she was not allowed to model for others after she moved in with Pic. Yet this did not worrant her for any financial support when they separeted. Oliver was left with no money at all and only one small drawing of gauch which at that time would not probably cover her expenses for a month.

Women under Picasso's brush are predominantly ugly, unsignificant, very often depicted as sex-toys, (with sexual organs emphased, for example) and were given little respect. Picasso painted a lot of ugly women during his cubist period, but he never draw his sons the same way. A clear line of distinction was drawn here.

As an artist myself, I always consider that cubism is way over-rated. It is an innovation of course, but come on, there are a lot of innovative artists out there. Picasso was idealised, worshiped simply because he was a humanist with tremendous ego and as such he was in great demand. He was the symbol of his time as well as ours - a man living for his ego and himself and today only. A sad period of time really.

Although this book does not look like an official biography, and definitely does not look like a journal (as most of the original journal were lost )written by Fernande Oliver, it told a lot of touching stories about the writer Oliver nonetheless, and her relation with Pic. The first 100 pages were not about Picasso, but about Oliver's life. The stories between her and Picasso were told in a touching and sentimental way, reflecting Oliver's personality precisely, and behind it, the feeling of guilty. As she probably forever blamed herself for her relation with other male artist when Pic would not bother to talk or pay any attention to her.

But it really did not tell a whole lot about Picasso. OK, the book is 286 pages, so it has to write something about Picasso. Right? The author had an agreement with Picasso that her memoir will not be published until 1988, after they both had long gone. She did get some money as an old lady, after she told Pic's agent that she had written the book. Pic did only then gave her some money after she repeated begged him for support thru the years.

The author basically lived a hard, sad, and lonely life either before she came to know Pic or after. She got her depression probably mainly during her relation with Pic, as he never talked to her apart from the time when he really wanted her to move in to his house. After that, he was his usual self again. He was the master and a woman like Oliver was only a insignificant servant. Now hear what this woman has to say. You will understand better, through her sense of guilty nonetheless, Picasso, a symbol of our time, a truly sad period of time.