Confirming Marie-Thérèse Walter as the model for the Une Anatomie drawings is not a simple task even though it is now generally agreed that she was his primary muse from 1927 until the early 1940s. This is mainly because she was not recognised as such until Roland Penrose revealed her identity in his 1958 biography Picasso: His Life and Art, (p. 243). Her invisibility, other than in encoded form in Picasso’s work, was a testament to his ability to hide her from his friends and biographers and, in some cases, their compliance regarding his need for secrecy. Olga, his Russian born wife, would undoubtedly have been infuriated had she known of her existence and Marie-Thérèse’s young age at the time of their meeting may have exposed Picasso to legal actions.

Gertrude Stein’s 1938 publication Picasso contains no mention of her and neither does Jaime Sabartés’ book Picasso: An Intimate Portrait published in 1948. Sabartés was a close friend during Picasso’s Barcelona days and in 1936 became his full-time secretary, which makes the following all the more revealing, “On March 25, (1936), after supper, I accompanied him (Picasso) to the station, the Gare de Lyon. He did not know exactly where he was bound, but seemed to be happy because he was going incognito and had a feeling he was doing something wicked. He did not want anyone to know anything about it – except me, because that he couldn’t avoid”. The so-called unknown destination was in fact Juan-les-Pins on the Côte d’Azur and Sabartés tactfully omitted to say that Picasso was accompanied on his ‘mysterious’ journey by Marie-Thérèse and their baby daughter Maya, as Penrose revealed in his 1958 publication (Penrose 1958: 258).

The secrecy surrounding his relationship with Marie-Thérèse has undoubtedly impacted on our ability to definitively link her to the Une Anatomie drawings and accounts for the late date that Richardson concluded that she was the inspiration for these drawings. “In retrospect it is easy enough to spot the countless references to Marie-Thérèse in Picasso’s work, but at the time few of the artist’s friends discerned her existence even when her appearances were no longer in code.” (Richardson 1985). Even as late as 1970 influential critics such as Robert Rosenblum appear to have been unaware that Picasso met his soon to be highly influential muse on the 8 January 1927. “The date of the beginning of Picasso’s relationship with Marie-Thérèse is frequently given as 1932,” and “That Picasso did, in fact, know her in 1931 is suggested by her appearance in paintings of that year of the blond, lunar head associated with Marie-Thérèse.” (Rosenblum 1970: 347).

 

The 1976 publication Picasso in Perspective, reprinted Rosenblum’s essay containing the same factual errors. This degree of uncertainty, at such a late date, is quite astonishing. Especially given the amount of paintings, sculptures, drawings and etchings that depicted her distinctive features in Picasso’s 1932 Paris retrospective. Even more puzzling is the fact that Françoise Gilot, an artist in her own right and the mother of two of Picasso’s children, clearly stated in her 1964 publication Life with Picasso, that he met Marie-Thérèse on a street near the Galeries Lafayette when she was seventeen (Gilot & Lake 1964: 235).

Somewhat bizarrely, it appears that it was an article in the 1968 Life Magazine double issue dedicated to Picasso, that revealed, for the first time, January 8 as the day of their first meeting, supposedly based on an interview with Marie-Thérèse.* And yet, years later, eminent Picasso scholars continued to make inaccurate, vague or somewhat inflammatory references to the profound impact that Marie-Thérèse had on his work.  For example Rosenblum’s otherwise excellent essay “Picasso's blond muse: the reign of Marie-Thérèse Walter” in Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, associated Marie-Thérèse, possibly unintentionally, with the stereotypical Hollywood trope of the blond bimbo. After lamenting the fact that Picasso scholars, such as himself and William Rubin, overlooked the significant impact that women such as Marie-Thérèse and Dora Maar had on the development of Picasso’s oeuvre, he then consistently described Marie-Thérèse as the ‘blond’ muse and even more tellingly as the “flesh and blood actresses who played roles in the dramas of Picasso’s life.” (Rosenblum 1996: 336-384). In the same essay Rosenblum rightfully credited Françoise Gilot with bringing Marie-Thérèse to public attention and here it is worth noting Gilot’s description of her,

“I found Marie-Thérèse fascinating to look at. I could see that she was certainly the woman who had inspired Pablo plastically more than any other. She had a very arresting face with a Grecian profile. The whole series of portraits of blonde women Pablo painted between 1927 and 1935 are almost exact replicas of her.” ... “Her forms were handsomely sculptural, with a fullness of volume and a purity of line that gave her body and her face an extraordinary perfection.” (Gilot 1964: 241).