Sharjah24 – AFP: Fifty years after Pablo Picasso’s death and five years after the #MeToo movement began highlighting celebrity abuse of women, a new exhibition in Paris focuses on one of the controversial artist’s early partners .
If Picasso’s reputation took a hit in the post-MeToo world, it’s partly due to the way he treated Fernande Olivier, his first serious partner.
But for Cecile Debray, director of the Picasso Museum in Paris, we cannot consider the artist only as the prism of modern sensibility.
possessive and jealous, Picasso locked Olivier in their rundown Paris apartment when he went out and made sure she adored him as he worked late into the night.
That shouldn’t, however, overshadow the history of their time together, say the organizers of a new exhibition at the Montmartre Museum, north of Paris.
The new exhibition puts pages of his memoirs alongside dozens of paintings and sculptures by Picasso and others from that famous circle of artists.
“Picasso, due to a kind of morbid jealousy, kept me like a recluse”, wrote Olivier in his diary. “But with tea, books, a sofa and some cleaning to do, I was happy, very happy.”
But his writings show he was more than a victim, Debray said.
