Picasso’s Women Fernande to Jacqueline

A tribute to the renowned Picasso biographer Sir John Richardson (1924-2019), whose intimate account of the artist's life forever changed the understanding of Picasso's art.

"The inspiration of nearly all his work comes from his daily life," the acclaimed Picasso biographer John Richardson wrote of the artist in 1962. This was nowhere more true than in Picasso's portraits of women. This volume traces the artist's depictions of eight women who played a prominent role in the artist's life and art: Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova Picasso, Sara Murphy, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, Sylvette David, and Jacqueline Roque Picasso. Each woman served as a catalyst for experiments in color and form that would continue to change as the contours of the relationship shifted. It is through this process that Picasso's work was constantly reinvented and renewed.

Published in association with an exhibition organized in honor of the late art historian and biographer, this book features reproductions of thirty-six paintings and sculptures; an extensive two-part newspaper article by Richardson written in 1962, "Picasso in Private"; and an illustrated chronology of the extraordinary exhibitions of Picasso's work curated by Richardson at Gagosian between 2009 and 2018.

John Richardson (1924-2019) was an art historian, curator, and critic. The first volume of his acclaimed four-volume biography of Pablo Picasso, A Life of Picasso, was published in 1991. Larry Gagosian is the founder of Gagosian, a global network of galleries specializing in modern and contemporary art.