Artist’s model and writer Fernande Olivier, or la belle Fernande, as Max Jacob called her, was Picasso’s first long-term companion. Olivier met Picasso in the summer of 1904 at the Bateau Lavoir. The couple’s relationship lasted seven years, and during this period, Olivier appeared in many of Picasso’s portraits.

Known today for her two published memoirs – Loving Picasso and Picasso and his friends – Olivier was a gifted writer, and her lively observations of the different personalities that formed the bande à Picasso (‘Picasso’s gang’), as well as the events that affected them, are invaluable documents of bohemian Montmartre.

As one of the most influential art dealers of fin de siècle Paris, Ambroise Vollard was known for his support of many young artists, including Picasso and the Fauves, and for mounting exhibitions of art by Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and the Nabi circle of artists.

From his first endeavours in 1890 selling art out of his apartment, to his legendary gallery on the rue Laffitte – where he was based from 1896 to 1924 – Vollard built up his activity as marchand-découvreur (‘merchant-discoverer’) at an opportune moment, as the Parisian art world shifted from a state-run Salon system to a network of independent dealers. Vollard’s shrewd business flair meant he was the first to show Picasso’s works in 1901, when the artist was barely nineteen years old and freshly arrived in Paris, ‘a young Spaniard, dressed with the most studied elegance’ (Ambroise Vollard, Recollections of a Picture Dealer, trans. Violet M. Macdonald, 1936).

French poet Max Jacob met Pablo Picasso, five years his junior, at the Bateau Lavoir in 1901. Jacob admired Picasso’s paintings, and became devoted to the man. Later he said, ‘I met Picasso; he told me I was a poet: It was the most important revelation of my life except for the revelation of the existence of God.’ (Jacob, quoted in Rosanna Warren, Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters, 2020)

Through the years, Jacob painted, and wrote novels, poems and operettas, for which Picasso would sometimes make engraved illustrations or frontispieces. Born into a Jewish family in Quimper, Brittany, Jacob became an enthusiastic convert to Catholicism and Picasso was witness at his baptism in 1915. However, his Jewish origins led to his arrest by the Gestapo in 1943. Destined for Auschwitz, Jacob was held in a detainment camp in Drancy where he died of pneumonia in March 1944.

In the autumn of 1903, American writer and poet Gertrude Stein arrived in Paris. With her brothers Leo and Michael, and later with her lifelong companion Alice B. Toklas, Stein was among the first to collect the then ‘scandalous’ paintings of the Fauves and Cubists, often purchased from Ambroise Vollard.

The Stein siblings organised a Saturday salon, which they hosted in their apartment in the Rue de Fleurus. The salons, attended by artists, writers and intellectuals, were comparable to, as Ernest Hemingway wrote, ‘the best rooms in the finest museums’ (Edward Burns (ed.), Gertrude Stein on Picasso, 1970). Every week, an international gathering of artists and visiting friends would come and contemplate the apartment’s walls covered with works by Picasso, Félix Vallotton, Henri Matisse, Marie Laurencin and others.

Picasso met Guillaume Apollinaire in late 1904. A young, well-travelled man of twenty-five, and ‘extraordinarily brilliant’, as Gertrude Stein would describe him, he was a poet and a magnetic force within the Bateau Lavoir circle of friends.

The figure of the harlequin, who appears in most of the engravings Picasso made in 1904, was conceived as an illustration to Apollinaire’s poems. In those years, Picasso’s paintings were filled with acrobats, circus workers and the artists of bohemian Montmartre – the same subject matter that populated Apollinaire’s poems of the time.

After receiving a serious head wound in the infantry in 1916, Apollinaire returned to Paris where Picasso drew classical portraits of his bandaged head. On 9 November 1918, the Spanish flu pandemic took Apollinaire’s life, two days before the armistice that ended the First World War. Picasso was commissioned to create a monument to his friend. For decades, Picasso laboured over drawings and paintings for the tribute, at one stage working with his friend Julio González to sculpt delicate metal sculptures. Unable to find the ideal form for the monument, Picasso eventually gifted a bronze sculpture of Dora Maar’s head to the city of Paris, to stand as a memorial to his late friend.

Born in Paris in 1883, Marie Laurencin was a celebrated figure of the Parisian avantgarde at the turn of the twentieth century. After training in the artisanal techniques of porcelain painting, she turned to oil painting at the Académie Humbert and became known for her dreamlike, curvilinear interpretation of Fauvist and Cubist techniques. Laurencin was part of the Bateau Lavoir circle that included Picasso and Georges Braque, as well as the Section d’Or group (which included the Villon-Duchamp siblings). Picasso introduced her to Guillaume Apollinaire, with whom she was romantically involved from 1907 until 1912.

Laurencin exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon d’Automne, and in the groundbreaking 1913 Armory Show in New York. She had relationships with men and women and was connected to the lesbian American expatriate writer Natalie Barney’s social circle. Her artwork frequently depicts women and animals in Sapphic utopias. Later, Laurencin also made sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes and Comedie Française.

In 1903, having completed his military service, French poet, art critic and writer André Salmon returned to Paris from Russia, where he had spent his teenage years. It was the year of what he called his ‘birth to poetry’: he went to soirées organised by the literary and artistic review La Plume, met writers Guillaume Apollinaire and Alfred Jarry, and founded, with some friends, the review Le Festin d’Ésope. Shown Picasso’s studio in rue Ravignan by the Catalan sculptor Manolo, the poet and later novelist joined the regulars at the Bateau Lavoir (where he would soon live himself). It was Salmon who titled Picasso’s 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Salmon published an essay on modern French painting in 1912, including an ‘Anecdotal history of Cubism’, which was the first testimony to the birth of the movement and established Salmon as an art critic.

Henri Rousseau worked as a second-grade clerk in the Excise office of Paris, and was affectionately nicknamed ‘Le Douanier’ (‘The Customs Officer’) by the artists and writers of the Bateau Lavoir. He was in his forties when he took up painting, and was greatly admired by his friends and contemporaries for his naïve and untrained work.

Picasso acquired a few of Rousseau’s paintings, describing one as among the ‘most truthful French psychological portraits’ (Picasso, quoted in Florent Fels, Propos d’artistes, 1925). He and Apollinaire organised a banquet in honour of Rousseau, for which the whole neighbourhood came together. André Salmon reported:

It was a little later, in Picasso’s studio, that the famous banquet was thrown for the Douanier Rousseau, considered by some to be a mystification when we wanted, very sincerely and with great success, to give great joy to an old man whose genius we believed in and to whom life had not always been kind. Georges Braque played his accordion. Rousseau played the violin. Marie Laurencin sang old songs. (André Salmon, Bravo, no. 32, Aug. 1931)

Born in Montmartre to a single mother, Suzanne Valadon (born Marie-Clémentine Valadon) supported herself with odd jobs from the age of ten. Between 1880 and 1893, while also working as a waitress and circus performer, she posed for artists including Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, simultaneously gaining an informal artistic education. At the age of thirty-one, Valadon began to paint full-time and, in 1911, her first solo exhibition was held at the Clovis Sagot’s gallery.

Valadon painted domestic scenes and still lifes and is celebrated for her unidealised images of female nudes – often artist’s models at rest or in repose. She was the mother of artist Maurice Utrillo.

In 1905, Derain was the initiator, along with Henri Matisse, of Fauvism. In the autumn of 1906, he moved to a studio in Montmartre next to Georges Braque and Picasso. He carved a set of sculptures bearing the influence of ancient and newer sources: Indian and Khmer sculpture, Roman statuary, Gauguin’s nudes, Cézanne’s bathers, and ‘the echo of the first cubist experiments of his peers’ (Brigitte Léal, ‘Derain’, in B. Léal (ed.), Dictionnaire du Cubisme, 2018). Derain painted alongside Picasso in the small port town of Cadaqués and made illustrations for poems and books by Guillaume Apollinaire and André Breton. Derain and Picasso remained good friends throughout Derain’s life.

At the end of November 1907, Guillaume Apollinaire introduced Georges Braque to the Bateau Lavoir crowd and, importantly, Picasso. From around 1908 to 1914, Cubism developed gradually through Braque and Picasso’s exchanges.

Picasso would confide to Françoise Gilot, years later: ‘Almost every evening, either I went to Braque’s studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day. We criticised each other’s work. A canvas wasn’t finished unless both of us felt it was.’ (John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. 2, 1996) Braque was the source of many innovations, which Picasso assimilated.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Jean Cocteau became a symbol of the literary avant-garde. Considering himself, above all, a poet, he invested in all fields of writing, working for ballets, the theatre and the cinema while also publishing novels and autobiographical accounts of his life.

Among his many friends, the first place undoubtedly went to Picasso. From the moment of their meeting, in December 1915, the poet harboured a deep fascination for the painter. Cocteau’s 1917 ballet Parade, for which Picasso made the costumes and decor, was a founding moment in their friendship; the same year, Cocteau was a witness at Picasso’s marriage to Olga Khokhlova.

Born in 1872 into a bourgeois family in Imperial Russia, Serge Diaghilev quickly came to find he preferred the company of artists to his law studies at the University of St Petersburg. By the age of twenty-six he was organising exhibitions and concerts, and had co-founded the magazine Mir Iskusstva (World of Art).

When Diaghilev met Picasso in 1916, the Russian art critic and ballet impresario had already established an almost mythical reputation by founding the Ballets Russes dance company. Beginning with Parade, which premiered on May 18, 1917, Picasso made the set, costumes and stage curtains for several of Diaghilev’s productions with the Ballets Russes.

Raised in St Petersburg in an aristocratic family of Ukrainian origin, daughter of an army colonel, Olga Khokhlova was twenty-one when she joined the Ballets Russes as a ballerina. While dancing for Parade in Rome in February 1917, she met Picasso, who had been working on the sets for the ballet. Khokhlova’s graceful, Ingresque features appealed to the painter, whose work had shifted towards a more traditional style as part of a return to order after his earlier Cubist experiments.

Picasso’s relationship with Khokhlova marked his entry into ‘high society’, signalling a significant shift in his social and financial circumstances. They married in July 1918 at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Alexander Nevsky in Paris. A few months later the couple moved to the very chic Hôtel Lutetia, then on the rue de la Boétie. Although they separated in 1935, the couple remained officially married until Khokhlova’s death in 1955.

Born into a family of painters, Albert Gleizes was self-taught and began painting in the very early years of the twentieth century. Through his network of friends, Gleizes soon became involved with a group of artists and writers known as the Abbaye group, active from 1906 to 1907. He would continue to seek out artistic collectives of exchange throughout his life.

In 1910, Gleizes approached Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, and Fernand Léger to exhibit at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants. The room dedicated to their work revealed Cubism to the Parisian public, in the absence of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, its creators. The publication of the book On Cubism (Du Cubisme) the following year, co-authored by Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, brought about the popularisation and stylisation of a Cubism which was, until then, hermetic and deeply theoretical. Cubism ‘triumphed’ at the Salon des Indépendants in 1912, then at the Salon d’Automne, drawing in many new recruits.

Jean Metzinger settled in Paris in 1903, and quickly established himself in the Parisian salons as a painter in the style of the Neo-Impressionists. During 1906–07, he was close to Robert Delaunay, who was, like Metzinger, a follower of Divisionism and Fauvism. In Montmartre, where he met Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, Metzinger frequently visited Picasso’s studio. In 1910, Metzinger joined the Salon Cubists and, distancing himself from the Cubist experiments of Georges Braque and Picasso, showed paintings with anecdotal subjects – often in large format with a decorative touch – at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne. In On Cubism (Du Cubisme), which Metzinger co-authored with Albert Gleizes in 1912, Picasso’s role in the invention of Cubism is overlooked.

When Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler arrived in Paris from Germany in 1902 to work in his family’s finance business, he played truant for a few hours each day to visit the Musée du Louvre. In May 1907, the then twenty-three-year-old Kahnweiler opened a small gallery (measuring only four by four metres) at 28 rue Vignon in Paris. Despite its size, the gallery quickly became legendary. It was the cradle of Cubism’s heroic age until 1914; the place where artists, poets and intellectuals met; the backbone of friendships and great hopes.

André Breton was a poet and writer, and in 1924, wrote the first Surrealist Manifesto, in which he defined surrealism as ‘pure psychic automatism’. In the years following the Manifesto’s publication, Breton and the broader Surrealist movement garnered many followers, including such artists as Max Ernst and René Magritte. While Picasso never signed a collective declaration, he was, according to Breton, a part of the Surrealist pantheon: ‘If surrealism must chart itself a moral line of conduct, it needs only find where Picasso has gone and where he will pass again’ (Breton, ‘Painting and Surrealism’, 1925).

Breton’s loyalty was such that, when the painter was criticised for his involvement in the ballet Mercure, Breton defended him with a tribute published in Paris Journal. However, Breton’s opposition to Stalinism and Picasso’s commitment to the French Communist Party resulted in the end of their friendship in 1944.

Joan Miró moved to Paris from Barcelona in 1921, renting a studio at 45 Rue Blomet from fellow Spaniard Pablo Gargallo. André Masson was his neighbour. There he developed an eminently personal, dreamlike visual vocabulary influenced by his encounters with poets associated with the Surrealist movement, including Robert Desnos, Michel Leiris and Max Jacob. Miró’s search for poetic intensity meant he naturally fell in with the surrealists from their beginnings in 1924. Poet, writer and leader of the Surrealist movement, André Breton, declared Miró to be ‘the most Surrealist of us all’ (Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 1928).

In 1929, Miró’s work shifted away from elegance and colour; he declared his will to ‘assassinate painting’ (Maurice Raynal, Anthologie de la peinture en France de 1906 à nos jours, 1927). Crude materials, muddy tones and scribbles replaced his colourful arabesques. Yet, he never abandoned poetry, continuing to integrate his language of pictograms into his paintings.

Salvador Dalí’s first trip to Paris in 1927 was marked by three important visits: to Versailles, to the waxwork museum (Musée Grévin) and to Pablo Picasso’s studio. Dalí often expressed his esteem for Picasso, whom he considered to be the greatest living artist ‘after Dalí’: ‘[H]e is a genius of the type opposite to mine, that is to say a destructive genius, heterogeneous and anarchist while my genius is increasingly closer to that of the angels’. (Dalí in an interview with Wilfrid Lemoine, 27 May 1958, Radio Canada)

In 1929, the success of the film Un Chien Andalou, directed by Luis Buñuel and written by Dalí and Buñuel, established Dalí’s reputation within the Surrealist group led by André Breton. Although he soon became one of the most famous Surrealists, Dalí was excluded from the group when his taste for scandal culminated in his allegiance to General Franco and a fascination with Hitler.

Max Ernst was a core member of the Surrealist movement that took shape in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1922, after serving in the First World War, the German-born artist and poet emigrated from Cologne to Paris. There he began a polyamorous relationship with poet Paul Éluard and his wife Gala (who would later marry Salvador Dalí), and began to collaborate with writer and poet André Breton. In the 1940s, Ernst married Dorothea Tanning.

Lacking formal training, Ernst engaged in highly experimental modes of art making. Working across a variety of media, including painting, collage, printmaking and sculpture, he produced dreamscapes that merge psychology and mythology and are representative of what Breton defined as ‘pure psychic automatism’.

Julio González studied painting at Barcelona’s School of Fine Arts in the 1890s, while working by day in his family’s metalworking business. He met Picasso and other modernist painters at Els Quatre Gats, the famous Barcelona café. Following his father’s death, González and his siblings moved to Paris around 1900, establishing a metalworking studio in Montparnasse.

The death of his brother Joan in 1908 led González to abandon painting and become a sculptor. Around this time, he became estranged from Picasso. They reconnected after a chance meeting on a Paris street in 1928, and soon after Picasso sought out González’s services as a sculpture technician. González also worked as a studio assistant for Paco Durrio and Constantin Brancusi. Picasso was fascinated with the way González worked metal ‘like a lump of butter’ (Picasso, quoted in Jean-Luc Daval, Julio González dans la collection de l’IVAM, 2004).

Picasso met Marie-Thérèse Walter in 1927; she was seventeen and he was forty-five. Their relationship lasted for approximately ten years. Their daughter, Maya, was born in 1935. During this time, Picasso remained married to Olga Khokhlova, and their relationship became increasingly acrimonious. They shared a young son, Paulo, born in 1921.

Much of the work made by Picasso in the late 1920s and early 1930s was inspired by his passion for Walter, who became his primary model. His obsession with the young woman was not limited to painting. It also found form in sculpture, lithographs and engravings. Synonymous with passion, escape and freedom, his young muse appeared to him as a saviour figure. Even today, the ‘Marie-Thérèse years’ represent a period of calm and intense creativity, at the service of a hedonistic and sensual art.

Fiercely political and artistically talented, Dora Maar (born Dora Markovitch) was active in surrealist circles and a member of the anti-fascist activist group Contre-Attaque, which was led by the co-founders of Surrealism, André Breton and Georges Bataille. While having trained as a painter, Maar was drawn to photography, producing fantastical, unsettling images using photomontage to explore Surrealist themes such as eroticism, sleep and the unconscious.

Maar met Picasso in January 1936. He was drawn to her intellect and commitment to her work. He encouraged Maar to return to painting and she produced several paintings during the Second World War. Quiet and sombre, they are imbued with the atmosphere of sadness and fear that pervaded occupied France. In return, Maar educated Picasso in photography and persuaded him to take an anti-fascist stance following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. In 1937, she documented the creation of what is widely considered to be Picasso’s most political work, Guernica (Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid). Maar never stopped creating until her death in 1997 at the age of eighty-nine, leaving behind a vast and varied oeuvre.

In early May 1938, Cuban-born artist Wifredo Lam came to Picasso’s studio at 7 rue des Grands Augustins. Lam’s discovery of Picasso’s work, seven years earlier, had come as a real shock. The young artist, freshly graduated from the Escuela Profesional de Pintura y Escultura de la Habana, was living in Madrid, enjoying the stimulation offered by the Escuela Libre de Paisaje, and surrounded by painters including Francisco Bores, José Moreno Villa and Salvador Dalí.

In April 1938, as General Franco’s Nationalist forces moved towards Valencia, he decided to leave Spain. He thus found himself at Picasso’s studio door, holding a letter of recommendation from their mutual friend, the sculptor Manolo. This visit provoked a ‘trigger effect’ in Lam. Although profoundly moved by Picasso’s work, his attention was caught above all by his collection of African objects. The affection was mutual between the two artists from the start. They saw each other almost daily until Picasso left for Mougins in July 1938.

Born into a bourgeois family in Auteuil, Michel Leiris was a poet, ethnologist and writer who changed the rules of autobiographical writing. He was close to poet Max Jacob and painter André Masson, through whom he became acquainted with the Surrealist group led by André Breton. He later broke from Breton’s Surrealism and joined the board of Documents, the Surrealist journal founded by writer and intellectual Georges Bataille.

In 1926, Leiris married Louise Godon, stepdaughter of art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Louise was the manager of Kahnweiler’s interwar Paris gallery (Galerie Simon), which she acquired during the German occupation of Paris in 1941 to avoid its closure under the anti-Semitic laws then imposed. It continued to be named Galerie Louise Leiris. The couple were close friends with Picasso, their friendship strengthened during the Second World War.

French writer and intellectual Georges Bataille embodied an almost mythical radicalism in his time, with his conception of literature as an experience playing with limits. He founded the Surrealist journal Documents in 1929, in opposition to André Breton’s articulation of Surrealism in the movement’s second manifesto, which Bataille decried as not ‘primal’ or ‘savage’ enough. The sexual nature and sadism of Picasso’s works from this time, inspired by his relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter, made him the hero of this dissident branch of Surrealism championed by Bataille. In the third issue of Documents (1930), Bataille published a homage to Picasso, where he described the artist’s important place within and contribution to the artistic landscape of the time:

In contemporary painting the search for a rupture of elevation taken to its limit, and for a blinding claim to brilliance, has a share in the elaboration or decomposition of forms, though, strictly speaking, this is perceptible only in the painting of Picasso.

Like other members of the Surrealist movement, artist and writer André Masson was fascinated by the mysterious forces of the subconscious and the irrational. These conceptual underpinnings of Surrealism found expression in many of the works he produced in the 1920s, for which he would often employ the technique of ‘automatic drawing’ to explore ideas of chance and metamorphosis.

Masson was among Surrealism’s ‘dissidents’ who, in 1929 and led by Georges Bataille, established the Documents journal, in which values discordant with those held by André Breton were expressed.

In 1933, Swiss dealer and publisher Albert Skira published the first issue of the Surrealist-oriented Minotaure periodical, the name of which was conceived by Masson and Bataille. This issue featured a cover by Picasso, and contributions from artists, writers, philosophers, critics and psychoanalysts.

Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti was a follower of André Breton’s Surrealist movement from 1930 to 1935. His work at this time reflected the dreamlike characteristics of Surrealist art and employed the techniques of editing and assembling to create metaphorically functioning objects. It was around this time that Giacometti met Picasso, whose work, like his, questioned the relationship between eros (the Freudian self-preserving instinct, i.e. sexual instinct) and thanatos (the Freudian death drive).

Giacometti’s friendship with Picasso continued beyond his Surrealist period until his return to realism, after the Second World War. While their temperaments differed greatly, they shared great freedom in the expression of their art.

The Hungarian photographer known as Brassaï (born Gyula Halász) arrived in Paris in 1924. He initially worked as journalist and reporter, though quickly began photographing the streets of Paris. Brassaï’s friend, the writer Henry Miller, remembered: ‘[Y]ou could meet him in the most unexpected neighborhoods … he was always on the alert, always sniffing the air, always nosing around in corners, always looking into the distance, just over your shoulder. Everything, literally everything, was of interest to him.’ (Henry Miller, letter to Franck Dobo, 1933, quoted in Annick Lionel-Marie (ed)., Brassaï: Notes et propos sur la photographie, 2000)

Brassaï was introduced to Picasso in 1932, and they became good friends, remaining close during the Occupation of Paris. Picasso especially admired Brassaï’s graffiti photographs, taken during his night rambles through the streets of Paris.

French poet Paul Éluard met Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault and André Breton soon after the First World War, in which he served as a military nurse. These new friendships, based on a common revulsion for the horrors of war and a fierce desire to destroy the established order, were the foundation of the Surrealist movement.

Éluard met Picasso in 1935, at a time when the latter, whose personal life was in great turmoil, had stopped painting. The following year, Éluard left for Spain to give a series of lectures on his friend’s art. On his return, he introduced Picasso to his friend Dora Maar. During the Spanish Civil War, both Éluard and Picasso were committed to the Republicans; Picasso exhibited Guernica in 1937, accompanied by Éluard’s poem ‘Victoire pour Guernica’. During and after the war years, Éluard and his wife Nusch holidayed in the south of France with Picasso, Roland and Valentine Penrose, and others. Their friendship continued until Éluard’s death in 1952.

Painter and illustrator Valentine Hugo (born Valentine Gross) was one of the first women to study at the École de Beaux Arts in Paris. At the turn of the century, she developed a passion for the Ballets Russes. The celebrated ballet company became the subject of her first works, which brought her fame in Parisian circles. Hugo met Picasso in 1916, through Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie, during the creation of the ballet Parade, for which Picasso designed the sets and costumes.

In the late 1920s, Hugo became involved with the Surrealists, becoming the romantic companion of both Paul Éluard and André Breton. She took part in many exquisite corpse (cadavres exquis) projects, participated in several Surrealist exhibitions, and was fond of astrology.

Born in Paris to an agronomist father and artist mother, Françoise Gilot was tutored at home in art and other academic endeavours from a young age. Her father placed great emphasis on education, pushing Gilot to become a lawyer. In 1939, following the declaration of war, Gilot was sent to Rennes for her first year of law school. Over the next four years, she alternated between pursuing her studies and devoting time to painting, holding her first exhibition during the Occupation of Paris in 1943.

Gilot met Picasso at Le Catalan restaurant around the time of this first exhibition, and invited him to attend her show. She soon began to visit him frequently at his studio at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins, engaging in open dialogues about art, and meeting his circle of friends. In 1948, they moved together to the small village of Vallauris, where Gilot further developed her painting and established an artistic correspondence with Henri Matisse. She and Picasso had two children, Claude and Paloma. Gilot parted ways with Picasso in 1953.

Maurice Thorez was made secretary-general of the French Communist Party in 1930. He was a prominent figure in French political life for three decades and remained at the head of the Party until his death in 1964. Thorez’s long friendship with Picasso began when the former returned from the USSR, where he had spent the Second World War. In the wake of the Liberation of Paris of 1944, the Communist Party had taken on unprecedented importance in France, particularly in intellectual circles. Picasso joined the Party on 4 October 1944, making a public declaration in the October issue of the French communist newspaper L’Humanité. The artist took part in several demonstrations and meetings, and provided generous financial support to several newspapers, organisations and activists related to the movement for years, long after Thorez’s death.

Born in 1913 in Basse-Pointe in Martinique, Aimé Césaire moved to Paris in 1931 to study at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand. In 1935, he began studies in literature and philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. With his fellow students, he founded the magazine L’Etudiant noir (‘The Black Student’), in which he addressed the concept of négritude – ‘black consciousness’ – to which he would devote his life.

Following his studies, Césaire taught and wrote prolifically, founding the cultural review Tropiques in Fort-de-France, Martinique. In 1948 he delivered a speech against colonialism at the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace in Wrocław, Poland. There, he met Picasso, with whom he had corresponded months earlier regarding a commission for Picasso to create a sculpture marking the abolition of Black slavery in Martinique. Picasso and Césaire continued to write to each other long after their meeting at the World Congress.

While staying in Antibes in 1946, Picasso met Julius Caesar Romuald Dor de la Souchère, a Latin professor and founder of the Musée Grimaldi, Antibes. Souchère invited Picasso to use the vast rooms of the fortress as a studio. From August to December 1946, Picasso made twenty-three paintings, fourteen oils on paper and thirty drawings, depicting nymphs and satyrs, Arcadian shepherds and fish spouting from ancient mosaics. The museum was inaugurated as the Musée Picasso Antibes in 1966.

Suzanne and Georges Ramié opened the Madoura Pottery studio in Vallauris in April 1938. Run as a family business, Suzanne made the prototype ceramics and Georges fired them. In July 1946, while holidaying on the Mediterranean coast, Picasso visited an exhibition of local handcrafts in Vallauris and was introduced to the Ramiés. Picasso was given the opportunity to model a couple of works, and was delighted to find them successfully fired when he returned a year later. He was given his own working area in the pottery and for the next twenty-five years returned annually to continue his ceramic production, which eventuated in some 4000 works.

In December 1953, a few months after Françoise Gilot had left him, Picasso met the young Jacqueline Roque, a cousin of Suzanne Ramié who worked with her at Madoura Pottery. Within a few days of their first meeting, Jacqueline’s face began to appear in the painter’s work. She never posed but was all the women in his paintings: the bathers, the woman brushing her hair or in the studio. Roque and Picasso moved together to La Californie in 1955, and were married in March 1961. She was his last companion.

Born in 1905 in Pas-de-Calais in the north of France, the son of a miner, and himself a miner at the age of fourteen, Édouard Pignon later became a mason. In 1927, he went to Paris, enlisted as a specialist labourer at Citroën, took evening classes, and joined the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (AEAR), which included Louis Aragon, André Breton and André Malraux, among others. In 1933 he joined the Communist Party. He was the graphic designer for the communist newspaper Regards when he met Picasso.

Pignon and Picasso became close friends through their shared political commitment. At Picasso’s invitation, Pignon and his wife, the art critic Hélène Parmelin, moved to live near Picasso in Vallauris in 1951.

Hélène Parmelin was an art critic at the French communist newspaper L’Humanité writing under the male pseudonym of Léopold Durand. Today, Parmelin is widely known for writing valuable books on Picasso (Picasso dit, 1966; Picasso sur la place, 1959), but she was in many ways a guardian of the French Communist Party, as exemplified in her novel Noir sur Blanc (1954) on the Korean War.

In 1951, she and her husband, the painter Édouard Pignon, moved to Vallauris, where Picasso had invited Pignon to share a studio. After Picasso settled in La Californie on the hills behind Cannes in 1955, Pignon and Parmelin continued to visit him often.

When Henri Matisse met Picasso in 1906 through Gertrude Stein, Matisse was twelve years Picasso’s senior, and was recognised as the leader of the Fauves. Picasso readily expressed his admiration for Henri Matisse, whom he considered the most important artist among his peers.

Italian-born Piero Crommelynck and his brothers, Aldo and Milan, opened their printmaking workshop in Paris in 1959, where Georges Braque, André Masson, Alberto Giacometti and Joan Miró gathered.

At the time, Picasso, aged seventy-eight, was settled in Mougins in the south of France and rarely travelled to Paris. With hopes of working with Picasso, Aldo and Piero Crommelynck moved to Mougins in 1963. Their collaboration with Picasso began in October, lasted nearly ten years and resulted in hundreds of engravings. The brothers prepared the brass, did the cutting, made the proofs and submitted them to Picasso almost daily. Piero’s haughty bearing and perfectly pointed goatee fascinated Picasso so much that he used them as inspiration for his first depictions of musketeers.

Art historian and writer, Pierre Daix was best known as one of Picasso’s biographers. Daix first met Picasso in 1945, through their common allegiance to the French Communist Party, and Daix was given access to Picasso’s personal art collection at Notre-Dame-de-Vie at Mougins in the 1960s. Daix published his first book on Picasso in 1964, and remained friends thereafter, amassing a great deal of biographical information about the artist. Daix authored the catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s Blue and Rose Periods, and also published extensively on the Cubism of Picasso and Braque.