Beyond verisimilitude

Picasso at twenty-five was famous in Paris, comfortably off by 1914, wealthy and internationally recognised six years later. He married a leading ballerina, Olga Khokhlova, in Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. It turned out badly. Two of his mistresses, Fernande Olivier and FranÇoise Gilot, wrote tell-all memoirs, which he did his best, unsuccessfully, to repress. At least two other mistresses, Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar, have attained independent fame through his manic and magic portraits of them. He became a communist during World War II but was hooted down by the party when he drew Uncle Joe as a mustachioed gallant. He died in 1973 at the age of ninety-one after a tumultuous final decade of work. John Richardson and Marilyn McCully are engaged in a multi-volume biography, which, after three substantial tomes, has brought the story up to 1933.