Picasso

Although the place of the theater in the work of Picasso has certainly been studied¹, the part played by the artist’s first wife Olga Khokhlova (1891--1955), a dancer in the Ballets Russes, remains little known.² It therefore seems appropriate to recount for the first time the course of Olga’s own artistic career as dancer, from her early training in Russia to her roles in Serge Diaghilev’s ballets and her meeting with Picasso in 1917. The study of the young Olga’s interpretations, which the artist is likely to have seen in rehearsals or in actual performances on stage, viewed together with analyses of his paintings devoted to the theme of dance, then makes it possible to reconsider the importance of “Olga the ballerina” in Picasso’s work, both as subject and as muse. This examination leads us, moreover, to broaden our field of study, till now essentially pictorial, to include the influences in which the artist immersed himself beginning in 1914 and which appear more explicitly in the works dating from his first meeting with Olga and the early years of their marriage. Fostered by the Italian context, the artist’s dialogue with antiquity and classicism opened a new chapter of his life involving the arts of dance and music, which Picasso discovered through his collaboration with the Ballets Russes and his love for Olga.

1 See, for example, Douglas Cooper, Picasso Theatre, London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 1968 ; Picasso and the Theater, exh. cat. (Olivier Berggruen ed.), Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, 2007.

2 The only article devoted to this specific subject is Anne Baldassari, “Olga Koklova and Dance,” in Picasso. 1917-1924: The Italian Journey, exh. cat. (Jean Clair ed.), Milan: Bompiani, 1998, pp. 96--99. Besides the Olga Picasso archives at FABA, this study relies for many details on the programs of Ballets Russes productions between 1911 and 1917. Research on these, however, remains to be completed, and the chronology may therefore be subject to revision.