The world will mark 50 years since the death of Pablo Picasso on April 8, but the world knows little about the artistic giant’s Ukrainian connections - some personal and some creative, according to Kyiv Post.
Olha Khokhlova is sometimes referred to as Picasso’s ‘mysterious wife.’ Kyiv Post’s Editor-in-Chief, Bohdan Nahaylo, wrote about Khokhlova and her relationship with Picasso in a piece for Panorama magazine:
“A young woman born in Nizhyn to an army officer’s family was embarking on her fascinating if ultimately tragic life. This was Olha Khokhlova, a graceful ballerina from a respectable conservative family who the brilliant rascal of an artist Pablo Picasso fell in love with, married, fathered a son with, painted again and again, and eventually left for a younger woman, the report notes.
“As their marriage collapsed, Picasso increasingly depicted Olha as a snobbish and neurotic depressive, and after they separated in 1935, she was left alone with their son and faded into obscurity. Picasso refused to divorce her for financial reasons and she died in Cannes in 1955, a dancer paralyzed by a stroke, her life broken by the man she had not only inspired but also introduced, as her grand-daughter wrote ‘to the world of aristocratic taste and savoir-vivre.’
“Olha was gradually removed from his biography, but an exhibition devoted to her held during the summer of 2017 at the Picasso Museum in Paris did much to highlight the significance of this ‘mysterious woman’. One wonders if Picasso thought of Olha and Ukraine when he posed in a Ukrainian embroidered shirt with his biographer Roland Penrose,” Nahaylo concludes.
