The life of Picasso’s model Marie-Therese, told in 42 short poems. It is unusual for Carcanet to produce an illustrated book, and in this case to host so distinguished an illustrator and designer as Jeff Fisher. His drawings animate the vivid voice of Marie-Therese, created with great immediacy by Julia Blackburn. Marie-Therese was seventeen when she met Picasso. He was forty-six. The poems, simple in language— daubed as it were—make sense of Picasso’s love for this young woman who was, John Berger says, ’the sexually most important affair of his life.’ They assume the young woman’s voice, taking up the story at their first meeting. Three years after his death, she took her own life.
