Rosalía Vila Tobella and the futile need to separate the artist from the art

Fernande Olivier was a painter and a French teacher, and also the first woman to write down, with almost clinical precision, what it meant to live beside that man. She met him in Paris in 1904, when he was twenty-three and unknown, and for almost a decade she was his companion and his most painted model. In return she got obsessive jealousy and physical violence, and when she began writing her memoirs in the 1930s, he took legal action against her to the point of blocking their full publication. The complete text only came out in 1988, twenty-two years after her death.

Olga Khokhlova danced for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, the company that was rewriting the language of European ballet in the 1910s. She met him in 1917 and gave up dancing the following year to marry him. They had a son, but by 1925 he was already looking elsewhere. When she asked for a divorce, he refused to divide their assets, forcing her to remain formally his wife until her death in 1955, after years spent trailing him and his lovers in total solitude.

Marie-Thérèse Walter was seventeen and had no idea who the forty-five-year-old man was who stopped her in the street. She gave him a daughter, Maya, in 1935, but they never married; she went on hoping for a marriage that never came. She took her own life in 1977, four years after he died.

Dora Maar, born Henriette Theodora Marković, was already an established photographer and one of the most original voices of French Surrealism when she met him in 1936. She had exhibited, published, and worked alongside Man Ray. It was he who gradually convinced her to abandon photography, a field in which she was enjoying full success, in order to devote herself to painting, a discipline in which she always remained in his shadow, and to paint her almost always in tears. When he left her for Françoise Gilot, Dora suffered a nervous breakdown followed by weeks of electroshock therapy, and spent the following decades in an almost mystical retreat, far from public life.

Françoise Gilot was already an independent painter, aged twenty-one, when she met him in 1943. She was the only one of the six who left on her own two feet, in 1953, taking with her the two children she had had with him. She later wrote a book about their relationship, Life with Picasso, which recounted the years together without filters, including the infidelities and episodes of domestic violence; for years he tried to have it withdrawn from the market, without success. She married twice more, the second time to the scientist Jonas Salk, and built a painting career spanning nearly a century, recognized by critics as independent of her past. She died in 2023, at the age of a hundred and one.

Jacqueline Roque had no artistic career of her own before meeting him in 1953, when she was working in a ceramics workshop in Vallauris. She married him in 1961 and stayed with him until his death in 1973, becoming the most portrayed woman in his entire body of work. After his death she managed his legacy, but she paid for that total devotion with the near-complete disappearance of her own identity: she took her own life in 1986.

Six women, six paths, almost all marked by a talent that had been recognized before he even entered their lives. And yet few people today could name them from memory. The painter who loved them all, at different times, with the same combination of "genius and violence," everyone can name, even without ever having seen one of his paintings in person. And it was precisely about him that, on March 3, as part of the "Spotify presents" series, Rosalía Vila Tobella said, in a public conversation with the Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez: "I like Picasso a lot and it has never bothered me to separate the artist from the work. Maybe I wouldn't have liked him so much because of the things I've been told about him, but who knows, maybe I would. I don't know and I don't care, I enjoy his work."

The remark, made almost in passing within a broader conversation about art and inspiration, sparked an immediate controversy as soon as it was isolated from its context. Several outlets, including Rolling Stone and ArtNews, reconstructed in the following days the biography of the man Rosalía was talking about: a relationship documented over decades of physical and psychological violence toward the women who succeeded one another in his life. About a week later, the singer returned to the episode in a video posted on TikTok: "I thought he was a very awful man, the typical cliché people say about him. I wasn't aware that there were real cases of abuse." She then added a sentence worth isolating from the rest of her apology, because it is more honest than most of the public statements we are used to: "It's important not to talk about certain subjects when you don't have enough knowledge."

The problem, indeed, was never whether one could still admire his work. The problem is that one can build and display, in public, an opinion on an enormous and layered subject without knowing its basics. It is not true that "you can't say anything anymore": if anything, the opposite is true. We say everything, about everyone, too quickly, before even having informed ourselves. And it is this exact mechanism, not the sensitivity of those who take offense, that is the real symptom of a public culture that has stopped distinguishing an opinion from a conditioned reflex.

Beneath the surface of the controversy, however, a harder question remains: can the work truly be separated from the man who made it? From a critical standpoint, no, not entirely. That obsessive gaze on the female body running through all of his output, that almost voracious ability to break down and recompose what he was destroying in real life, arises from a specific relationship with specific women, not from a genius fallen into a vacuum. But the opposite is also true, and this is where the question stops having a comfortable answer: in many cases the work is considered great precisely because he was what he was, strengths and flaws held together, not despite them. It is not a contradiction to be resolved. It is a tension to keep in mind every time we look at one of his paintings.

There is, though, one last mechanism, almost never acknowledged, and probably the gravest of all. Every time a new controversy about him breaks out, as this one did, we witness the same sequence: first the outrage, then the perfunctory defense, and finally, inevitably, the return to talent, complete with a survey of his output and explanations of when and why he painted what, as if anyone still needed it. "Yes, but he was a genius": a sentence that closes every discussion before it has even opened, because it shifts attention from the harm done to a real person to the abstract value of a work. Even those who condemn him, even those who are right to do so, end up talking about him anyway: about his technique, his psychology, the price that art supposedly "demands," as if he were a force of nature greater than any single victim. No one ever lingers on them long enough. Fernande, Olga, Marie-Thérèse, Dora, Françoise, Jacqueline never return as protagonists of a story of their own, but only as details supporting his: a biographical parenthesis, a marginal note, proof of his genius or of his cruelty, never a subject in their own right. So every time the Picasso controversy reopens, as it did with Rosalía, we always end up talking about him. Never about them.

And this, in the end, is the real problem of this story, far more than the single offending sentence. Not that someone said the wrong thing about a "brilliant and violent" man, but that, after days of discussing it, no one felt the need to say a single word more about them. Beauty, in theory, should apologize to no one. And yet I, as I look at it, feel a little like doing so. Not for him, but for Fernande, for Olga, for Marie-Thérèse, for Dora, for Françoise, for Jacqueline, deprived, to varying degrees, of the possibility of remaining themselves while they stood beside him, of continuing to be painters, dancers, photographers, and not simply "one of the women of…". Rosalía does not have to stop admiring his works, and neither do we. But the next time someone reopens this controversy, and someone will, the real question will not be whether he was a genius. We already know that; we've been told for a century. The question will be whether, this time, someone will finally remember to say their names.

In memory of Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque.