Think of Picasso, and it's impossible not to envision the women he loved, tormented and painted, like Fernande Olivier, whose distorted features are indelibly associated with early cubism, or Dora Maar, often depicted weeping, or Marie-Thérèse Walter, whose face and body the artist sundered so violently during his surrealist years. "For me, there are only two kinds of women—goddesses and doormats," he told his postwar partner, Françoise Gilot, as she recounted in Life with Picasso, her 1964 memoir.

Since Picasso's death in 1973, the works emerging from these liaisons—and the gripping tales behind them—have provided fodder for countless museum and gallery shows.