ART

Pablo Picasso devoted a series of sketches and paintings to a lover with whom he was having a secret affair while his mistress was dying from tuberculosis, claims an article in the October issue of House and Garden magazine. The magazine also exhibited the love-inspired artwork the artist created for the woman, Gabrielle Depeyre Lespinasse. Several of the pieces feature messages of adoration Picasso painted in the margins, which Lespinasse tried unsuccessfully to erase before her death in 1970. Picasso was “supposedly inconsolable” at the time because his mistress of four years, Eva Gouel, was dying of tuberculosis, the article alleged. The affair, kept secret from even his closest friends, including Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, began in Paris in the fall of 1915 when the artist was 34 and Lespinasse was 27.