another weird thing from Gilot’s book

This is so strange I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of it before.

Picasso’s estranged Russian wife Olga, from whom he had been separated for over a decade, was a bit of a stalker. But it was a little weirder than that.

She would find out where Picasso was, at all times. When he was in Paris, she would go to Paris. When he was in the South, she would go to exactly the same town in the South, even though both Picasso and their son would ignore her whenever she tried to speak to them.

Françoise Gilot got it even worse. Whenever she was walking down the street holding her baby, Olga would follow her. Once she came up behind her and pushed and pinched her.

Whenever Olga met Gilot inside a building, she slapped her.

One day at the beach, Gilot was reclined backward with her hands in the sand. Olga came up out of nowhere and walked across her hands in high-heeled shoes. Whenever Gilot put her hands back in that position, Olga would again reappear and walk across her hands in those sharp heels. Finally, Gilot tripped her and she fell face-first in the sand, and never returned to bother them at the beach. But Picasso found this fight hilarious, and laughed straight through it.

At those times when Picasso was in Paris, Olga would send him harangues in letters virtually every day about what a terrible person he was. Often, she would include a picture of Rembrandt with the notation “if you were like him, then you would be a great artist.” Somewhat bizarrely, this would bother Picasso a great deal.

There are several troubling aspects to this story. One is that it’s told even by Gilot in the manner of: “what an annoyance!”, whereas for most of us in 2011 it would be more along the lines of: “we need a restraining order against this psycho woman immediately!”

But perhaps the more troubling aspect is how Picasso left such a trail of these mentally broken women. That’s not such a surprise; you get a taste of it from even the briefest biographical sketch. But it’s disturbing to see so much evidence of his callousness through one chapter after another.