Olga Picasso

Exhibition at the Musée Picasso, Paris, 21 March - 3 September 2017

Between 1917 and 1935, Pablo Picasso shared his life with Olga Khokhlova, a dancer with the Ballets Russes whom he married in 1918. Until her death in 1955, Olga kept the memory of this life together in a large trunk containing souvenirs of her career as a ballerina, numerous letters written by her family back in Russia and dozens of photographs of her life at the time.

In this exhibition catalogue, these documents, some of which have never been published before, shed new light on Olga's extraordinary destiny, the painter's production during this period and the influence that the figure of his first wife had on his work, even after their separation. From the classical representation of a pensive, melancholic woman to the violent representations of the end of the 1920s, paintings, drawings and engravings bear witness to the dark metamorphosis that the artist made her model and her work undergo, as their married life evolved.