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Thursday, 28 April 2011 04:59

Picasso’s Teen Muse Marie-Therese Inspired Squidy Beasts, ’Terrible’ Sex

"Marie-Therese accoudee" by Pablo Picasso, is part of "Picasso and Marie-Therese: L'Amour Fou" on view at Gagosian Gallery through June 25. "Marie-Therese accoudee" by Pablo Picasso, is part of "Picasso and Marie-Therese: L'Amour Fou" on view at Gagosian Gallery through June 25. Photographer: Beatrice Hatala/Gagosian Gallery via Bloomberg

The elevator to the Manhattan apartment of Picasso biographer John Richardson opens on life- size photocopies of two paintings.

Inside the sprawling flat, the Spaniard’s intense eyes gaze from black-and-white photographs and book covers displayed amid vases of white lilies. Drawings, paintings and lithographs line the walls.

Picasso has been part of Richardson’s life for almost 60 years. With three door-stop volumes of the biography in print, Richardson is working on a fourth.

We met last week to discuss “Picasso and Marie-Therese: L’amour Fou,” an exhibition Richardson, 87, curated for Gagosian gallery in New York.

“Except for Jacqueline, his second wife, this was the longest, most-enduring love of his life,” said the patrician Richardson in a tweed jacket.

The artist was 45 and unhappily married in January 1927 when he spotted the voluptuous 17-year-old Marie-Therese Walter on a Paris street.

The creative deluge that followed is the subject of “L’amour Fou.” Its almost 90 paintings, drawings and sculptures explore love, lust and desire through Surrealism, Cubism, deft academic drawings, scenes of rapture, bulbous eyes, phallic noses and stick figures that predate Giacometti.

“Some are very tender, some are rough sex,” said Richardson, who organized the exhibition with the couple’s granddaughter, Diana Widmaier Picasso.

What was Walter’s appeal?

‘No Fool’

“She was exceedingly submissive, infinitely sustaining and no fool,” said Richardson. “She understood his need for affairs on the side and she forgave that because she knew that fundamentally he belonged to her.”

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