“The best way to make a dream come true is to wake up”

What Marie-Thérèse Walter’s dreams were could be easy to imagine: in 1932, the year in which she is portrayed sleeping by Pablo Picasso in “The Dream”, she is just over twenty years old but has been his lover for some years , despite the fact that the painter is still married to the dancer Ol’ga Chochlova and has a son by her.

Perhaps then the young girl dreamed of a happy relationship with the man she loved, even though she was aware that she could not have her in a life other than the dream one?

Waking up from her sleep and in the following years, Marie-Thérèse manages to get – at least in part – what she wanted: from a neighbor she had already become a neighbor of Picasso, continuing to be a living presence of the family as well as of the painter, of which was the greatest inspirational muse at that time.

Picasso, Il sogno – Courtesy Aletes

Maya was born in 1935, and this event coincides with the request for divorce and the escape of his wife with their son. The lover and his daughter lived for a period with Picasso, but shortly afterwards the relationship cooled down when the man fell in love with the surrealist artist Dora Maar, who was configured aesthetically, but also intellectually, as the opposite of Marie.

Perhaps things for Marie-Thérèse did not end exactly as she hoped, however she remains an irreplaceable figure in the life and production of Pablo Picasso, who portrays her over and over again.
It will then be his grandson Olivier Widmaier Picasso, the son of Maya, to publish “Picasso: The Real Family Story” – the biography of the famous grandfather.

However, there are many sleeping women that the artist loved to portray, all immersed in dreams where they could concretely approach their desires, before waking up and finding a way to make them come true.

Picasso, Jeune Fille Endormie – Courtesy Artworld