"Picasso was one of the greatest and most fascinating artists ever. A few years ago I went to an exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute on Picasso and Women which took a close look at one of the issues critics from all directions focused on for years. How did cubism and his complicated relationships with women coincide? Why is it he sometimes seemed to depict love as something like murder when he had such passionate relationships with so many women? Did he hate women? Was he a genius? Was he crazy? If you look at his paintings of women, some of them repainted at the most tumultuous times of his relationships with them, or when the relationship was over, you had to wonder if he might bee essentially misogynist. And yet, when he died, why is two of his former lovers committed suicide? Many of these rocky relationships, veering toward madness as they seemed to do, were the source of his most productive work over the course of an amazing career where he forsook tradition and forged new directions few understood at the time.

Julie Bermant and Clement Ouberie combined to create a four volume biography of Picasso that I read in its one volume collection. Picasso was 91 when he died, supposedly with a brush in his hand, so they had to make a decision about which Picasso they would focus on. They chose the early, pre-famous Picasso, when his lover was Fernande Olivier, who becomes the romantic center of these books. They are subtitled for the key relationships with males that were important for him from the time he was in Montmarte and lived with Fernande, including the poets Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, but she, one of his many muses, is the frame through which we see Picasso. The painter Georges Braque, and his great rival Henri Matisse play central roles in the tale, as do a cascade of names we associate from the period, such as Gertrude Stein and her husband, Alice B. Toklas, cameos in a wild Parisian play, with sex, wine, drugs and art in dizzying array.

If you know nothing about Picasso or this period in Paris, you will be lost wondering who all the people are, I suspect, even after 340 pages. It is a huge and impressive and lovely undertaking, depicting the events and color and feel of the time, and it is never boring. It evokes a time, in comics fashion, versus giving a factual account. We get poetic impressions of the relationship between Picasso and so many people. And the depiction of him here is largely sympathetic, though it was clearly his rages and jealousies made him difficult to deal with

The series is based on Fernande Olivier’s memoir Souvenirs Intimes. Picasso’s first great love, Olivier is still known as “la belle Fernande�. Her book is a close-up view of the seven years she spent with the painter � mostly in the infamous Bateau Lavoir or “Laundry Boat," a ramshackle artist colony built on the side of a hill. It's mostly a romantic vision of an amazing time. I think a depiction of two decades later would be a very different book and different Picasso. But this is impressive and fun.

The Fernande of this book is much like many French comics depictions of women (and often BY women) I have read in recent years: Catel’s Kiki de Montparnasse, Hubert’s Miss Don’t Touch Me, Penelope Bagieu’s Exquisite Corpse, romantic portraits of wispy-haired, lithe, free and lovely (mostly waif-thin) women. I like them all, I'll admit, but I have to say they are similar. Audrey Hepburn? Amelie? After each reading or viewing, I just want to go to Paris. I want to live in that period, drink wine with that crowd. I think I might have written more in my life! Now how much to fly to the south of France� If you like this period and know the names, it will be great to travel back to it with Julie Bermant and Clement Ouberie. It was for me."