In Search of Fernande

This portrait fascinated me at a recent exhibition at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona (July 2024). It was painted by Joaquim Sunyer (1874–1956), a Catalan artist who I knew nothing about.

I found the portrait fascinating. Her gaze is intelligent, searching, and extremely analytical.

The portrait is (perhaps) of Ferdinande Olivier,  having posed for Sunyer with a friend for an earlier painting representing Spanish women at a bullfight. The Picasso Museum is running the exhibit because she was famously in a relationship with Pablo Picasso.

But the figure of Olivier is so much more magnetic than simply as the muse of the grandiose male artists of Montmartre at the beginning of the 20th century.

Despite this, precious little exists to reflect who she really was aside from the ways that she featured in the lives of these men.

Her own writings have been published, and I have managed to find a copy of them. I can't wait to learn what it was like to be drinking buddies with Gertrude Stein and Apollinaire and to be a female artist at the dawn of the 20th century.

Here's to getting to know Fernande and her experiences of life aside from her relationship with that little Papi Chulo, Pablo Picasso.