Pablo Picasso roared with triumphant laughter. "I promised to have it done without any newsmen around, and for once I won," he said. Not until last week did it come out that on March 2 in the Riviera town of Vallauris the 79-year-old master had secretly married Jacqueline Roque, 35, his brown-haired longtime model.
Jacqueline is the latest of many women in Picasso's life, though he married only one other. The ladies often modeled for him, and a gallery of their portraits that appeared last week in Paris-Presse is a sampler of his painting. The first portrait was of wistful Fernande Olivier, with whom Picasso lived in a one-room atelier on Montmartre before World War I.
Sometimes he painted her in the style of his Blue Period, other times rather in the mode of Toulouse-Lautrec. By 1918 Picasso and Fernande had parted, and that year he married the dancer Olga Koklova, by whom he had his son Paolo, now 40.
Picasso was already in his cubist period at the time, but his portrait of Olga was almost classic in its serenity. He separated from Olga shortly before plunging into an affair with Marie-Therese Walter by whom he had a daughter.
In the late '30s he began to be seen with Dora Maar, a beautiful woman who kept appearing on his canvases with a cub-istically dislocated face. Even more unflattering was his muttonheaded portrait of Painter Francoise Gilot. Though Picasso and Francoise had two children, she finally left him in a huff. "I am not living with a man," she complained, "but with a monument." Picasso was all of 71 when the blow fell, but he soon found consolation with young Jacqueline. If the Paris-Presse portrait is any indication, this marriage may turn out to be the happiest.
She appears on canvas as quite human, painted in the delicate blues and pinks Picasso used in his youth.