There is little else to go on as Marie-Therese herself was not inclined to write of her experiences with Picasso as had Fernande and later, devastatingly, would Franqoise Gilot. Marie-Therese descendants through their daughter Maya are reluctant to probe the perversity of this relationship, fondly remembering their grandmother as a gentle, caring person. But compliant life with the self-styled Minotaur left its mark, as may be seen in the succession of portraits. Marie-Therese’s grandson, Olivier Widmaier Picasso, only says that in their secretive lives together Picasso “controlled everything”, while she “remained a prisoner, spending her entire life in a gilded cage”.50 Neither his studies, nor those of his sister Diana, move us very far towards an explanation of why, four years after Picasso’s death, she should take her own life.
Indeed Diana Widmaier Picasso has gone to the extreme of idealizing her grandfather as a titan of sexuality in the lavishly illustrated Picasso: Art Can Only Be Erotic (2005). Seeing him as the Minotaur-genius of modern painting, she aggregates his most sexual art over the course of his entire career to find its essence. While there is some truth in this highlighting, the effect is to eliminate all relational considerations which have come to view in biographical reconstructions. One would never guess from her presentation that Picasso’s urge to seduce was other than natural discharge of male passions, or that its cost in suffering needs accounting for. No attempt is made to answer Huffington’s charges of destructiveness, let alone address the possibility of character pathology. Nor are the charges of manipulation and neglect made by Marina (daughter of Paulo) considered, although they had been available in print since 200l. Unlike Marina (b. 1950), Diana (b. 1971) had no first-hand experience, having never met her grandfather. Further, she fails to acknowledge her brother Olivier’s (b. 1961) book which at least admits the compromising emotional involvements of the artist’s long life. Diana’s fantasy about Picasso’s sexually-charged creative energy has the unwanted effect of holding up for admiration many of his most decadent paintings, especially those made towards the end of his life. It is too late to argue for Picasso as a liberating genius when evidence points another way.
To return to reasons for Diana’s grandmother’s suicide, we should consider the developmental deficits of Maria-Therese’s childhood which left her with life-long insecurity. Marie-Therese Leontine Deslierres was born July 13, 1909, the illegitimate daughter of Leon Valroff, a wealthy Swedish businessman in Paris who was married with a family, and Emile-Marguerite Walter who was suffering an unhappy marriage. While Marie-Therese’s father secretly saw to her welfare, actual paternity was denied, and mystification surrounded exactly who she was. Her birth name derived from the villa where she was born, and only after acknowledgment by her mother in 1911 did she acquire the surname Walter.51 While seeming independent and self-assured, Picasso could well have picked up signals that she could be easily charmed and manipulated.
There are several realistic portraits of Marie-Therese from 1928, including a strange boxed-in close-up lithograph probably of that date. This picture may be partly disguise, a cautious step away from the monogram MT he had first used to avoid detection of their affair. However, the lithograph also betokens captivity.52 The bronzes Picasso did of her in the early 1930s tend to have bulbous features like growths where the nose should be. These same distortions appear in the graphics both of the head alone and of the artist with his sometimes sleeping model. Picasso appears to have been concerned that his model should witness him in the act of remaking her physiognomy, even when for the worse. We do not know what Marie-Therese thought about these wilful distortions, nor about paintings sometimes sweet and demure but also garishly dislocated as in Woman with a Blue Hat of 1939 (Not in Zervos).53
In her essay “Deformation-Transformation: The Body in Picasso’s Oeuvre, 1927-1937” published in an exhibition catalogue, Pablo Picasso and Marie-Therese Walter: Between Classicism and Surrealism, Dominique Du-puis-Labbe challenges William Rubin’s observation that, referring to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Picasso “had a visceral fear of and repugnance towards the female body, which he at the same time insatiably desired and exuberantly idealized”. Dupuis-Labbe thinks that “during the passionate liaison with Marie-Therese, there was absolutely nothing left of that fear, if it ever existed”—he was only exploring the mystery of relations between the sexes. She does allow he was also “wavering between wonderment and terror”.54 But what is “terror” if not “visceral fear”? This strong language points to an issue that remains unaddressed by critics—to what extent was Picasso afflicted by gynophobia? Was he fearfully averse to the actual processes of female reproductive function, sheltering in the romantic glow of sexuality alone? Was perverse control of women’s sexuality owing to fear of their becoming pregnant and actually giving birth? This possibility arises in the masterful Girl Before a Mirror of 1932 in the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Zervos VII, 322), in which alluring and repelling aspects of the gravid female are combined in one composite figure. She is angel and demon, Eve and the witch, goddess and doormat; Marie-Therese’s pregnancy had occasioned this startling confession of inability to resolve ambivalent feelings. Picasso never painted a more psychologically truthful picture, leaving testimony to a dilemma common among men but intensely unsettling for himself. “Terror” may be too strong a word, but there is little doubt that Picasso’s insights were bought at the high price of unrelieved sexual anxiety, even dread. He fell back on the Minotaur’s legendary hyper-masculinity to protect himself, as instanced in the ink drawing of 1933 Minotaur and Woman (Marie-Therese) (Zervos VIII, 112).
Picasso’s approach as artist to Marie-Therese was to make her over, manipulate and recreate her form to take full control of her being. We see both idealizations, as in tender portrait drawings of 1935-6, and gross distortions as in the Seated Nude of 1933 (Zervos VIII, 91), reducing the female body to a pile of biomorphic shapes.55 This tactic signaled that he could not find a middle range of feeling in which to regard his gentlest, least threatening of women simply as a person to be admired, albeit as a magnificent specimen of the opposite sex. There is much visual caressing, or perhaps ogling, of rounded female forms, together with bulbous distortions and doubling of faces, as if to signal fear of duplicity. But actual duplicity and suspicion were not in Marie-Therese’s nature, and there is no cataclysmic falling off of her portraits into final dismissive attacks as in the cases of Fernande and Olga. The relationship with Marie-Therese simply dwindled (though Picasso always looked after her material needs) as other erotic interests developed. His fatherhood of Maya made him see once more the actuality of birth, although he did not readily acknowledge paternity. As Maya grew, however, he celebrated her childhood in a series of charming portraits. Yet he did not realize, nor care to consider, the extent to which he had invaded Marie-Therese’s inner being to exploit her loyalty. She had to endure Picasso’s notorious affairs with Dora