Gilot is Picasso’s amanuensis, his interlocutor and interpreter, his money manager, his model. When they move house, it is she who loads and unpacks the car. He stays up late, so she does, too, and she is out of bed first thing in the morning to start the fires at home and in his studio, since “he had very suavely made the point that it was only when I built the fires that the place ever got warm enough.” More difficult is the situation with his other women, whom he arrays before her like an obstacle course: fragile, resentful Dora Maar; Marie-Thérèse, who writes him loving letters daily, and, when she and Gilot meet, warns her not to “take my place.” (Gilot tells her not to worry: “I only wanted to occupy the one that was empty.”) It would be a stretch to say that Gilot expresses solidarity with her predecessors, but she does feel sympathy, even for Olga, half mad with bitterness, who ambushes her and Picasso on vacation and trails them in the street, shouting curses. At the same time, Gilot analyzes them like a general reviewing lost battles, looking for their vulnerabilities so that she can seal up her own.

There’s no way to know, of course, if all this happened as Gilot says it did. (Lake said that she had “total recall,” a claim that tends to raise rather than allay suspicions.) She has the memoirist’s prerogative—this is how I remember it—and Picasso’s tyranny and brilliance are hardly in dispute. The bigger mystery is Gilot; the self in her self-portrait can be hard to see behind the lacquered irony and reserve. She goes along with Picasso’s more outlandish demands and schemes, but, she tells us, “not at all for his reasons.” Her dissent is withering and sarcastic rather than furious; like other women of her generation who pointedly overlooked the bad behavior of their husbands, she is concerned with preserving her own dignity. When she is seven months pregnant with Paloma, her doctor (an obstetrician this time) tells her that she is in danger; the labor has to be induced immediately. Alas, this is inconvenient for Picasso, who is due to be at a World Peace Conference elsewhere in Paris the same day. After much grumbling, he decides that his driver will take him there and then come back for Gilot. Even in a book full of ghoulish caprice, this incident stands out, but Gilot treats it with an eye roll. What really bothered her, she says, is what Picasso wore when he finally showed up at the hospital: ripped, tatty pants. Then she launches into a long complaint about his inability to buy new clothes. This may be a standard case of displacement, Gilot directing onto his attire an anger fuelled by the man’s egomania. But she had devoted her life to him. The least he could do for her was put on a decent suit.

When “Life with Picasso” first came out, this kind of anecdote did not go over well with Picasso’s supporters, who denounced Gilot as a spiteful ingrate and rushed in to avenge the great man. (He had tried to block the publication, and afterward he never saw Claude or Paloma again.) “Françoise Gilot had the good fortune to be loved by the most inventive and creative artist of this century—perhaps of all time,” John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, wrote, in a caustic review of her “wretched book.” (Later, they became friends.) Patrick O’Brian, the author of the Aubrey-Maturin novels, met Picasso just after his breakup with Gilot, and published a biography of the artist that portrayed Gilot as a self-absorbed villain who didn’t have “the least idea of the tension under which a creative man must work.”

Critics like these readily acknowledged that Picasso did harm to those around him, but their feeling was that genius ultimately justified transgression. Art demanded sacrifice—particularly with someone like Picasso, whose life fed his work. (Discussing Picasso’s hatred of Olga, Richardson wrote of the “rage, misogyny, and guilt that fueled his shamanic powers”; you can practically smell the spilled blood.) Now the popular view is at the opposite pole. Last year, the Australian feminist comedian Hannah Gadsby, in her Netflix special “Nanette,” performed an incendiary bit about Picasso’s treatment of women, quoting some damning lines from Gilot’s memoir and lamenting in particular the case of Marie-Thérèse. (“Picasso fucked an underage girl. That’s it for me, not interested.”) Next to these trampled lives, Gadsby couldn’t care less about the art.

And lives were trampled. Picasso died, at the age of ninety-one, in 1973. In 1977, Marie-Thérèse Walter hanged herself; eight years later, Jacqueline Roque, Gilot’s successor and Picasso’s second wife, shot herself in the head. Paulo, his son with Olga, drank himself to death, in 1975, and Paulo’s son, Pablito, killed himself by swallowing bleach when he was barred from attending his grandfather’s funeral. This is a body count out of Greek tragedy.

“Aspects of Femininity,” from 1994 Courtesy Várfok Gallery

Yes, others may think, women’s lives were destroyed, but at least they got to be immortalized in the process. Gilot writes that Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar themselves both felt this way, and so did Fernande Olivier, his first love. This spring, Gagosian mounted a show called “Picasso’s Women,” with the apparent goal of rescuing Picasso’s wives and lovers from their status as victims and returning them to their perch as muses to a genius. The exhibition copy, buffed with pinup prose (“blonde Venus Marie-Thérèse . . . Jacqueline Roque, the devoted, romantic beauty”), argues that Picasso’s depictions of each woman captured “not how she presents herself to the world, but how she feels inside.” The show featured “Le Rêve” (1932), the lovely, serene portrait of Marie-Thérèse that Steve Wynn put his elbow through a dozen years ago; if you look closely, you can see that half of her sleeping face looks like a phallus. This was how she felt inside?

But it’s hard to make the case that caring about the lives of these women means throwing a cloth over their painted faces and walking away. It may be that the more you know the harder you will look, and look, and look. You can look forever and still wonder what it is that you see.

Gilot’s memoir shines, now, as a proto-feminist classic, the tale of a young woman who found herself in the thrall of a dazzling master and ended up breaking free. But it is also a love story, and a traditional one. The contradiction is right there in the book. “At the time I went to live with Pablo, I had felt that he was a person to whom I could, and should, devote myself entirely, but from whom I should expect to receive nothing beyond what he had given the world by means of his art,” she writes toward the end. “I consented to make my life with him on those terms.” Where is the fierce, proud girl we met at Le Catalan? Gilot explains it simply: love changed her terms. She wanted “more human warmth” from Picasso—to be a family. (He responded by having another affair.) Unseemly pain begins to well up. She admits to crying all the time, “something terribly feminine and—for me—most unusual.”