Sue Roe – författare

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of In Montmartre by Sue Roe, read by Emma Bering.The real revolution in the arts first took place not, as is commonly supposed, in the 1920s to the accompaniment of the Charleston, black jazz and mint juleps, but more quietly and intimately, in the shadow of the windmills - artificial and real - and in the cafés and cabarets of Montmartre during the first decade of the century. The cross-fertilization of painting, writing, music and dance produced a panorama of activity characterized by the early works of Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck and Modigliani, the appearance of the Ballet Russe and the salons of Gertrude Stein.In In Montmartre, Sue Roe vividly brings to life the bohemian world of art in Paris between 1900-1910.

Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Therese Walter, Dora Maar, Francoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque. These six extraordinary women loved and inspired Pablo Picasso. They frequently appear as the women in his portraits, but they also pursued their own ambitions in dance, writing, painting, and more. Each transformed Picasso's life and work-and he theirs. Yet they have long been dismissed as simply passive models or muses.

In?a groundbreaking and deeply researched account, acclaimed author Sue Roe brings to light the true stories of the women in Picasso’s life. Using recently discovered source material and hitherto overlooked firsthand accounts, Roe positions each woman not as a footnote in Picasso’s biography, but center stage, from their own point of view.

All six lived remarkable, unconventional lives on their own terms. Each was tested not only by the subterfuges and betrayals of the art world’s most notorious womanizer, but also by the wider social turbulence of their time. Hidden Portraits traces each woman’s story across nearly a century, from bohemian early-twentieth-century Montmartre to the glittering Riviera in the 1920s, from Paris under Nazi occupation to Picasso’s death, and beyond. Roe unearths the ways these women influenced every stage of Picasso’s work, from his sketches to masterpieces like Guernica.

Under her eye, we recognize Fernande in the early Rose Period paintings; Olga draped across an armchair; Marie-Thérèse asleep in a painting of a woman dreaming; Dora in Picasso’s weeping women; Françoise in his paintings of domestic life; Jacqueline as the raven-haired figure frequenting his late-in-life drawings.

Spanning seventy years and traveling between the cafés of Paris and the Côte d’Azur, Roe reclaims a set of brilliant women, and in the process rewrites a vital chapter in the history of modern art.