His First Wife, Olga: Glamour and Fracture

Portrait of Olga in an Armchair shows an elegant woman. Her name was Olga Khokhlova, and she was Picasso's first wife. About two years after Eva Gouel died of tuberculosis, Picasso met Olga. They met not in Paris but in Rome.

In February 1917, through an introduction from Jean Cocteau, who had written the scenario for the ballet Parade, Picasso took on sets and costumes for the company led by Sergei Diaghilev, a hugely famous ballet impresario in Russia. One of that company's principal dancers was Olga Khokhlova. She gave up ballet after marrying Picasso, but she was a gifted dancer who had taken major roles in celebrated ballets. Picasso fell head over heels for the beautiful 25-year-old and spent that whole year following the company around, whispering words of love. Their romance became the talk of the troupe, and when they began living together, Olga naturally left the ballet. They married in July 1918 in the Russian church in Paris.

Around then, an exhibition he shared with Matisse was a huge hit, and Picasso used the income to take Olga on a trip to the south of France. Where earlier work had a certain gloom and darkness, he now seemed to have found peace of mind, painting soothing scenes such as women swimming in the blue sea. He was no longer the Picasso of the Bateau-Lavoir days, too poor to buy new canvas and painting over old pictures. As a successful painter enjoying a wealthy life, with a beautiful wife who had been a dancer, he became a fixture of social and cultural gatherings in the early 1920s. Painting portraits of elegant patrons and dealers, he earned an enormous amount of money, and spent just as much.

In 1921 their son Paulo was born. Feeling a father's love for the first time, Picasso began to paint his son, including Paulo dressed as a harlequin and Paulo in a white hat. Even the portrait of Olga is suffused with elegance, evoking a bourgeois wife.

Their happiness didn't last, though. At first there was her beauty and the thrill of society life, a world he had never known, but Picasso was not someone who naturally found interest or joy in such things. After the wedding, Olga's extravagance grew day by day, to the point of a nanny, a cook and a chauffeur. Picasso wore down under that lavishness and began to look to other women around him, having affairs.

Olga's position wasn't easy either. She had left Russia, but after the Revolution of 1917 her homeland was in a very hard time. Letters from family, friends and acquaintances spoke of chaos, shortages and hardship, and her heart ached. Then she even heard that Picasso had a secret lover. When exactly she learned of it is not known, but from that point it must have been hard for their relationship to improve.

Even so, they didn't divorce right away. There were several reasons: Picasso had a vast fortune, and they had a son. And because he was a Spanish national, Spanish law would apply to a divorce, which reportedly made it far from easy. Olga also refused to grant a divorce until she died in old age. That is why, for all his notorious affairs, Picasso had only two legal wives. In his later years, looking back on his marriage to Olga, especially its closing stretch, he reportedly said it was exhausting, painful and awful.