The doctor had barely closed the door when I heard the words that would follow me for the rest of my life. “He’s gone,” Jacqueline said, her voice flat and final. Pablo Picasso was dead, and within hours, she made it painfully clear that none of us—his children, his former lovers, the people who had shaped his world—were welcome to say goodbye. Only Paulo, his first and only legitimate child, was allowed to attend the funeral.
Even in death, Picasso’s spite reached out and struck us. I had known him for years. I had loved him, borne his children, and eventually escaped him. But even after I ran, he found ways to hurt me, to sabotage my work, to poison my name in the art world.
And now, with him gone, I thought the wounds might finally heal. I was wrong. Pablo Picasso was born in 1881 in Malaga, Spain, and he was drawing before he could properly speak. His father, José Ruiz Blasco, was a respected artist and professor, and he saw something in his son that went beyond mere talent.
When Pablo was seven, José began training him personally, passing down the strict, traditional methods of the old school. The boy absorbed everything, but he never stayed within the lines for long. One day, José walked into the studio and found Pablo painting over one of his own sketches, transforming it into something new, something better. José later said that he knew in that moment he had nothing left to teach his son.
He handed over his brushes and never picked them up again. José still wanted the best for his boy, so he pulled strings at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, arranging for Pablo to take the entrance exam for an advanced program. He was only thirteen, and the exam was supposed to take a month. Pablo finished it in a week.
The academy had no choice but to admit him. A few years later, when even that institution became too limiting, José tried to send him to Madrid’s prestigious Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. But Pablo refused. At sixteen, he defied his father and struck out on his own, convinced he had no use for more formal training.
He was right, in a way, but he still had everything to learn about the world. At nineteen, he arrived in Paris, not speaking a word of French and with no plan at all. He met a journalist named Max Jacob, who took pity on him and helped him settle in. The two became fast friends and even roommates, but they were so poor they had to burn Picasso’s own paintings just to stay warm through the winter.
It was out of that misery that his famous Blue Period was born, inspired partly by poverty and partly by the suicide of a close friend in 1901. The paintings were bleak, bathed in shades of blue and blue-green, full of suffering and sorrow. By 1904, the gloom lifted, and his Rose Period began, with warmer colors and lighter subjects—acrobats, harlequins, circus folk. That shift coincided with the arrival of a woman named Fernande Olivier, a bohemian artist who became his mistress and his muse.
The two connected instantly, but Picasso was never good at staying with one person for long. He was already moving through the Parisian art world, catching the eye of powerful collectors like Gertrude and Leo Stein. It was at one of their parties that he met Henri Matisse, a fellow painter whom he both admired and resented. They had enough in common to be friends, but too much pride to avoid becoming rivals.
Picasso’s artistic evolution was relentless. In 1909, he partnered with Georges Braque to create analytic cubism, breaking objects down into their basic shapes and reconstructing them in neutral tones. By 1912, they had moved on to synthetic cubism, gluing bits of paper and fabric into their compositions, inventing the collage in the process. He never stood still, neither in his art nor in his relationships.
His affair with Fernande ended when he fell for a woman named Eva Gouel. He felt little remorse in leaving Fernande behind. But then the war came, and the world changed. When World War I broke out in 1914, many of his friends in Paris were called to fight, but Picasso, still a Spanish citizen, had no obligation to join and stayed behind in Avignon.
His heartbreak came from another direction: Eva developed tuberculosis and died in 1915, leaving him hollow. He tried to fill the void with work, with movement, with new people. He found a new circle with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, designing sets and costumes for them. There, he met a ballerina named Olga Khokhlova, and for once, he seemed serious.
They married in 1918, and in 1921, they had a son, Paulo. But the marriage was never happy. Olga wanted the high life, the dinner parties, the galas, and Picasso, though he tolerated it for a while, was never comfortable. They fought constantly.
And inevitably, he strayed. In 1927, he set his sights on a seventeen-year-old girl named Marie-Thérèse Walter. He called her his golden muse. He kept the affair hidden from Olga for years, but in 1934, Marie became pregnant, and Picasso moved her into an apartment shockingly close to his own.
When Olga found out, she did not scream or weep. She packed her bags, took their son, and left for the South of France. And when Picasso asked for a divorce, she refused, flatly and without negotiation. She would not give up her half of his property, which included his work.
They remained legally married until she died in 1955, and she made sure she got a generous allowance out of the mess. By that time, the world had shifted again. The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, and as the horror of the conflict unfolded, Picasso poured it into a single monumental canvas: Guernica, born from the bombing of a Basque town by German and Italian forces. The painting was an instant masterpiece, a raw and violent protest against the slaughter.
When Francisco Franco’s dictatorship took hold of Spain, Picasso refused to let the painting return to his homeland. It would stay in the United States, he said, until democracy and liberty came back to Spain. It didn’t return until the 1980s. His inspiration for Guernica, as with so much of his work, came partly from the woman he was seeing at the time: Dora Maar, a photographer and activist.
But their relationship was as volatile as everything else in his life. After the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, Picasso stayed in the city but refused to exhibit, knowing the Nazis despised his work. When the war ended and Paris was liberated, he parted ways with Dora and immediately moved on. That was when I came into the picture.
I was twenty-three, an art student with ambitions of my own. He was sixty-three, famous, magnetic, and utterly consuming. We were together for nine years, and I had two children with him: Claude and Paloma. I thought, for a time, that I could build a life with him, that things might be different.
But I was young, and I was naive. Picasso was not a partner. He was a force, and he could not stand competition, especially from me. He wanted me to be his muse and nothing more, but I had dreams of my own, and he resented that.
He became a bully. He destroyed my possessions, including artworks, books, and the treasured letters I had received from Henri Matisse. He turned art dealers against me, sabotaging my career before it could truly begin. He wanted to own me completely, and when I refused, when I finally gathered the strength to leave, I took our children and ran.
That was in 1953. For years, I kept my silence. But in 1964, I published Life with Picasso, telling the world what he had done to me and to so many others. The book exposed the darker side of his genius: the cruelty, the manipulation, the infidelity, the destruction.
He was furious. He tried everything to stop the book from being published, but he failed. And so he chose his own form of punishment: he cut off all contact with me and with his own children, Claude and Paloma. He never spoke to them again.
He found comfort with a woman named Jacqueline Roque, whom he married in 1961. She was the last of them all, and she was fiercely loyal in a way no one else had been. In his final years, Picasso worked obsessively, churning out paintings and etchings in a frenzy, aware that time was running out. On the night of April 7, 1973, he and Jacqueline had dinner with friends, and afterward he retreated to his studio and painted until the early hours of the morning.
When he finally went to bed, he had no idea he had put his brush down for the last time. He woke around noon the next day, too weak to get out of bed. Jacqueline called for a doctor, but within minutes, he suffered a heart attack and died in bed. She gave him a proper send-off, but it was not for everyone.
When his children tried to pay their respects, Jacqueline made it clear they were not welcome. Only Paulo, the legitimate son, attended the funeral. The rest of us were shut out, even in death. He was a genius, no one can deny that.
But he was also a broken man who poisoned nearly every relationship he had. His legacy lives on in his work, in the museums and the galleries and the endless reproductions of his most famous paintings. But for those of us who knew him personally, life with Picasso was never a work of art.
