The Day Picasso Sucker Punched a Turkish Lady - Video

The lady’s name was Behice Soydan. She was one of Picasso’s greatest fans. Since the years when the famous painter, while still very young, first came from Spain to France and was penniless, Behice, who was the mistress of a renowned Turkish diplomat and studying art history in Paris, had been following him. Behice and Picasso’s first meeting took place in the summer of 1955, eighty days after the painter’s first wife Olga Khokhlova’s death. Behice, arm in arm with the mature diplomat she hadn’t been able to convince to marry, hadn’t even managed to get divorced from his wife, accompanied by a journalist friend, visited the Villa La Californie, overlooking Cannes, which Picasso had bought that year. Behice was well-versed in the most crucial details of Picasso’s relationship with Olga. Right after offering condolences, she wanted to impress the painter by revealing this knowledge, but Olga’s death had caused Picasso not only sadness but also ignited a deep anger fueled by profound regrets in his heart. Picasso was more agitated than ever, showing no hesitation in breaking hearts or being rude, especially towards strangers with whom he had no financial or emotional ties, which he didn’t hesitate to display, particularly when meeting them for the first time. Before his death, Picasso’s contemporary painter Henri Matisse had begun to paint images of odalisques living in the harem. After Matisse’s death, Picasso also became intrigued by harem women, even jokingly said, “Matisse left his odalisques to me as a legacy.” Now, Behice wanted to make a joke about that. But her French wasn’t great, and neither was Picasso’s. Picasso thought Behice referred to Olga as odalisque and threw a sucker punch. The day she received the blow, Behice was thirty-six, and she carried the deformation on the right side of her face, until the end of her life – May 2001, found dead in her Beykoz apartment – with bitterness. Picasso deeply regretted what he had done afterwards. And Pablo Picasso immortalized Behice Soydan with a painting of his primitivism era: Femme nue au bonnet turc (Nude woman with Turkish bonnet).

Femme nue au bonnet turc
Nude woman with turkish bonnet
Cubism, Naïve Art, Primitivism
Villa La Californie overlooking Cannes