Painting a Vivid Picture of Life with Picasso; Loving Picasso - the Private Journals of Fernande Olivier (Abrams. Pounds 24). Reviewed by Richard Edmonds

Byline: Richard Edmonds

Fernande Olivier was the first of Picasso's serious lovers. Beautiful, wayward and highly intelligent she told of her experiences with the artist in a colourful diary which until now has remained in the original French. But at last, after an eight year gestation period, the diaries have appeared under the title Loving Picasso in a translation by Christine Baker and Michael Raeburn with an epilogue from John Richardson, the Picasso scholar who set this fine project in motion.

Picasso was 22 when he moved into Montmartre, settling in 1904, in a ramshackle, scarcely sanitary building known cheerfully as the Bateau Lavoire. Fernande (or La Belle Fernande) as she was known to the artists, poets and dossers who made up Picasso's circle turned up within months of his moving into Montmartre, and since life and art were inseparable for him, she appears in much of the early work as the model.

She kept a diary …

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Publication information: Article title: Painting a Vivid Picture of Life with Picasso; Loving Picasso - the Private Journals of Fernande Olivier (Abrams. Pounds 24). Reviewed by Richard Edmonds. Contributors: Not available. Newspaper title: The Birmingham Post (England). Publication date: June 16, 2001. Page number: 48. © 2009 Birmingham Post & Mail Ltd. COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group.

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