Picasso spent the last years of his life enjoying a final, unremitting spasm of creativity. He produced five or six paintings a day and seldom went out. He was living in Benjamin Guinness’s villa in Mougins, a walled property outside of which the paparazzi and fans gathered; journalists and the odd child from one of his previous relationships occasionally tried to climb over the wall. He had by then, of course, a gatekeeper wife – a common figure in the lives of prominent men – whose job was to organise his complicated existence, protect his legacy and shoo away, with her finger to her lips, the press he’d courted in the days when it seemed fun to be an international superstar. Her name was Jacqueline Roque. After he died, she shot herself. 

Although mercurial in many ways, as a lover Picasso slid conventionally into the mould of the rich and famous man. The six important women in his life occupied predictable places on the arc of his celebrity: that is to say, all were very young, all were beautiful and each was selected in reaction to the last. Fernande Olivier, the farouche but determined artists’ model, gave way to Olga Khokhlova, a highly groomed dancer from the Ballets Russes who presided over his initiation into a world of wealth, modish culture and airless parties, and whom he married. Reactively, he then alighted on the sportif and gauche Marie-Thérèse Walter, a woman never far from a medicine ball; he turned from her to Dora Maar, a professional photographer with a career, a discriminating eye and printmaking skills to teach him. Then came Françoise Gilot, already a painter and seemingly an ingenue. Finally, there was Jacqueline to defend him against the financial and emotional demands issuing from her predecessors and their children, now living in various houses at Picasso’s expense. He always believed that ‘if you wanted to leave a woman, you had first to make sure she was provided for’. 

However, Picasso was not a serial monogamist. His relationships often ran concurrently, overlapping with one another. That with Marie-Thérèse extended until his death, an event which precipitated her suicide soon after. He never divorced his first wife, Olga. For Sue Roe, who has arranged her book in chronological sections,