FEW of Pablo Picasso’s mistresses have survived to sing the praises of the painter who was notorious for his destructive power over women.
Geneviève Laporte, 79, a French poet, yesterday sold her Picasso drawings, and spoke with tenderness of the elderly artist who seduced her in the early 1950s.
Mme Laporte, who was 17 when she first met the painter in wartime Paris, called the works “love-letters” that Picasso had drawn for her. “I want to get the message out about who Pablo was,” she said.
“They make him out a macho, a monster, a guy who stubbed out a cigarette on a woman’s cheek. Look at these drawings: there is only tenderness. It’s blindingly obvious.” She had originally wanted to be buried with the drawings but realised that they were “part of the history of art, an unknown period in Picasso’s life, the ‘years of tenderness’ ”, she said.
The ink, charcoal and pencil sketches, rarely seen and kept in a safe since 1972, fetched a total of €1.54 million (£1.02 million) at the Artcurial saleroom in Paris last night. The most expensive lot, the sketch entitled Odalisque, was sold for €473,000.
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The sketches are mainly of Mme Laporte in the two years of the affair that began in May 1951. One of them, La Femme qui pleure (The Crying Woman), was for a long time identified as Dora Maar, another mistress. Mme Laporte, who went public with the hitherto secret affair in a 1972 book, appears as a bride and as Geneviève au tricot marin (in a sailor’s jersey).
Mme Laporte broke up with Picasso when declining his invitation to move in with him in St Tropez in 1953. Despite her love for him, she said later that she escaped just in time.
The artist, who referred to his women as “doormats or goddesses”, left a trail of emotional devastation. Two of his lovers, Marie-Thérèse Walter and Jacqueline Rogue, committed suicide after his death in 1973 at the age of 92. The artist told friends that Mme Laporte had “saved my life”. She met Picasso when she went to interview him for her school newspaper. Already famous, the 62-year-old was all charm until he exploded with anger when she told him that young people did not understand his paintings. He nevertheless befriended her and she became his mistress several years later. The affair began when she was visiting the 70-year-old Picasso at his studio in May 1951, when he was living with Françoise Gilot, the mother of two of his children. A thunderstorm approached. “I said I was going to go home,” she said. “At that moment, it was like a fairytale. The room grew dark, and through the skylight I saw a sky like I had never seen before, except in the Congo during tropical storms. He told me, ‘Wait a little while, there is going to be a storm’ . . . I have no memory of what happened next.” Yesterday Mme Laporte said that there was something uncanny in the air as thunderstorms hit Paris.
“It is very strange. It was in a storm that I fell into the arms of Pablo and this week the storm came back. He was either furious because I was selling or saying ‘Thank you, mission accomplished’.”
HISTORY OF ART