But she was not just a silent figure, but a sensitive observer of the bustling bohemian world of Montmartre, which she captured in an early memoir, “Picasso and His Friends” published in 1933.
“I lived with them, closer to them than anyone else, since Picasso’s house was also his house,” explained Fernande Olivier in that work, full of reflections on those painters, and praised by critics.
Those memories, in the form of written notebooks, along with various canvases that testify to his pictorial skill, are part of the exhibition that opens at the Montmartre Museum on Friday, and which will remain open until February 19. Fernande Olivier’s objects alternate with paintings and sculptures by Picasso and the greatest artists of the time.
The context of the separation of Picasso and Fernande Olivier is complex and illustrates the chiaroscuro of the brilliant author of “Guernica”. “Out of a kind of morbid jealousy, he kept me secluded. But with tea, books, a couch, and little housework. I was happy, very happy,” Olivier recalls in his scrapbook.
Picasso is a possessive lover, and an unknown and penniless artist. Olivier is a fragile woman without resources, but intelligent. He paints her obsessively, and Fernande Olivier will be central to her artistic search, as witnessed by “Bust of a Woman”, a 1907 canvas that preludes “The Women of Avignon”.
Picasso will be “the only lover of this type that Fernande Olivier will have, which represents a counterweight to the figure of the Minotaur” that the painter himself revealed about himself, estimates Cécile Debray, president of the Picasso Museum in Paris.
But Picasso, known for his overwhelming personality, will find love in the arms of another woman, Eva Gouel, wife of the painter Louis Marcoussis, in 1912.
Fernande will confess years later to the writer Paul Léautad that she was also unfaithful. “Boredom!” She exclaims to justify herself.