SECRET PICASSO DRAWING RATTLES HIS BIOGRAPHY

an uncatalogued secretly coded portrait drawing of Marie-Thérèse Walter triggers an avalanche of shocking revelations once deciphered

CHâTEAUGUAY, QUEBEC, CANADA, May 23, 2023/EINPresswire.com/ — Picasso’s biography will never read the same, and not just in regard to his personal life with three among his legendary “seven women”, Eva, Olga and Marie-Thérèse; it looks as if many of his key masterpieces had also been misread by the experts after Picasso led them astray over their true meaning. The Three Dancers (1925), today at Tate Modern in London and the 1937 Guernica which is said to be 20th century’s most talked about work of art are only two of them.

At the heart of this century-old imposture is a woman famously known as the “sleeping blond muse” and whose relationship with Picasso was always extremely secretive; still today, art historians continue to speak of an impenetrable “Marie-Thérèse mystery”; this, however, has suddenly come to a close following the publication of a new memoir.

PICASSO AND MARIE-THÉRÈSE WALTER: THE CENSORED STORY (Tellwell Talent, July 2022) reveals how Marie-Thérèse (1909-1977) was never the illegitimate daughter of Émilie Marguerite Walter as we were told. To protect Picasso’s reputation (later his Memory after his heirs took over the cover-up), Marie-Thérèse’s family origins were falsified says Marc Poissant, the author of the memoir; because, “to know the identity of the true mother was also inevitably to know that Picasso was familiar with this young girl right from the crib.” This, of course, is not what our trickster had said; having to erase the narrative of Marie-Thérèse’s early years Picasso came up with the story where he said that he met her on the streets of Paris in January 1927: “She was only seventeen you know…”

But this story is “a complete fabrication” according to The Censored Story, just one of Picasso’s many tall tales designed to protect his stealth some of which was squarely in the realm of the unlawful. As Picasso, himself, once explained to journalist Hélène Parmelin : “You must not always believe what I say; questions tempt you to tell lies, especially when there is no answer.” In the case of Marie-Thérèse Walter, there would indeed be “no answer”, ever; at least not until now.

The fluky discovery in 1988 of “Marie-Thérèse in Pigtails” (see book cover at Amazon.com), the title which the author (also owner) gave to Picasso’s secret drawing, this has allowed him to resuscitate the main framework of Marie-Thérèse’s suppressed narrative. The drawing shows the model as both adult AND toddler (the pigtail and the much smaller left arm and hand); more importantly, the drawing is also secretly coded with ‘RO’ and the name EVA (3 times!), for Eva Gouel, Picasso’s former live-in mistress who passed away from breast cancer at age thirty in 1915. The father (RO) is also identified in Chapter 16.

As we read in the memoir, the drawing was made “for secret eyes only”, a kind of private family document testifying to Marie-Thérèse’s true family origins. The full deciphering of the drawing belongs to Chapter 23 but noticeable at the bottom left is Picasso’s “deliberately ruined signature” says the author, who also reminds us of the fact that Picasso NEVER signed his artworks at the bottom left. Signed Pic, plus an add-on which is both totally illegible and especially much too long for ‘Picasso’, the casual or uninvited viewer is lured into concluding “not Picasso”. Curiously, however, “Pic” was precisely what Marie-Thérèse always preferred to call Pablo according to multiple sources (Chapter 1), including Diana Widmaier Picasso who wrote about her grandmother in 2004.

The memoir, well-researched and highly documented (“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”), explains how it was Picasso’s sexual indiscretions with a prepubescent girl that eventually fostered the “Marie-Thérèse mystery”. In his Afterword, however, the author warns everyone against the temptation to label Picasso a pedophile. “Picasso loved women, all sorts of women” he writes, and his sexuality cannot and should not be “pigeonholed” just to satisfy our craving for simple and handy classifications.
The new tell-all book is a must-read, and not just for Art History students; this is Picasso and many of his world-known masterpieces as we never saw them before.

To contact the author: marcpoissant@videotron.ca
The memoir (23 chapters, 295 pages, 5 illustrations) is available at https://www.amazon.com/Picasso-Marie-Th%C3%A9%C3%A8se-Walter-Censored-Story/dp/022887971X and other retailers like Barnes and Noble, eBay, Indigo and more.

Marc Poissant
Marc Poissant
marcpoissant@videotron.ca