Maternity

‘Olga Khokhlova is an exception in the story of Picasso’s love life. The daughter of Stepan Khokhlov, a colonel in the Imperial Army, and of Lydia Vinchenko, she was his first official wife, and the first woman to give him the experience of fatherhood, with the birth of Paul on February 4, 1921. From the moment they met in 1917, the young woman seemed to crystallize all the ambitions of a mature man who, at that point, was looking for a calm and peaceful love life, after the death of his previous companion, Eva, in 1915. […]

[…] This decision, which seems to have been contemporaneous with meeting Olga Khokhlova, gave rise to a number of behavioral, social, and moral analyses and interpretations—which have since become clichés— suggesting the undue influence of a bourgeois, conservative spouse. In reality, we know that Picasso had initiated this new direction as early as 1914-1915, two years before he met Olga. Following Pierre Daix, it is important to state just how much his Neoclassicism, his penchant for deformation and unfinished states, was deeply subversive and far removed from any “return to the European order”—but this is not our intent here. We would rather highlight the extent to which Olga’s presence as a spouse and model was revolutionary and decisive to Picasso’s creative process, even in all of his work that came later. It was a powerful confirmation of the visible, deliberate, crafted, and fantasized fusion of the domestic sphere and of artistic creation, of life and art’.

Text: PHILIPPOT, Emilia, Joachim Pissarro y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (dirs.). Olga Picasso. [Cat. exp. Museo Picasso Málaga, 2019]. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2019, pp. 15 y 71.