The Surrealist photographer Dora Maar once told John Richardson, the biographer of Pablo Picasso, her lover in the Thirties and Forties, that when a new woman entered the artist’s life, everything else changed: the style of his work, the coterie of friends, his poetic foil, even his dog. She, like most of the other women in Picasso’s life, was abandoned by him after a tempestuous few years together, when the painter Françoise Gilot caught his famously intense gaze.
Maar’s theory has become orthodoxy: it was the grounds for much of Richardson’s multi-volume biography, a project that, for all its remarkable insights and research, has drowned out alternative responses to the man and his work. Now, it’s very clearly the blueprint for the BBC’s three-parter marking the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, and indeed quoted by one of the talking heads, the Gagosian gallery’s Michael Cary.
