Geneviève Laporte
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Genevieve Laporte (born in 1926 in Paris) was one of Pablo Picasso's last lovers.
She is perhaps most famous for auctioning off twenty works, many with her as a subject, that were bestowed upon her during a secret love affair with Picasso in the 1950's. Reportedly, she met the artist as a teenager during World War II, finding common ground in poetry. She was in her mid-twenties when the affair began in 1951, though Picasso was nearly fifty years older than his French model and had just fathered two children with Françoise Gilot. Some art historians and museums carrying Picasso's work have dubbed the paintings he made around that time the 'Genevieve Period', as many of them feature symbolic tributes to his belle as well as dedications "To Genevieve". Picasso wanted Laporte to move in with him after Gilot had left him in 1953, but she refused, which, she was told by Jean Cocteau, "saved her skin" [1]. In 1959 she married a fellow Parisian resistance fighter instead.
In June 2005, she auctioned off the drawings Picasso made of her. With this money she created a foundation "Genevieve Laporte de Pierrebourg, pour la defense de la nature et des animaux", with agreement of the Fondation de France.
She made 18 documentary films in Africa, and the Academie Francaise awarded her a prize in 1999 for a volume of poetry. Laporte wrote 16 books, four of which on Picasso:
- Si tard le soir le soleil brille (1973), (English translation: Sunshine at midnight (1974))
- Un amour secret de Picasso (1999),
- Du petit Pablo au grand Picasso (2003),
- Le grand Picasso (2004)
Her most recent book is "Du petit Wolfgang au grand Mozart" (2006).
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