ABSTRACT
This biography begins and ends with a portrait, a charcoal drawing of resistance heroine Madeleine Riffaud by one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, Pablo Picasso. Riffaud had turned 21 in August 1945, when the portrait was drawn in the artist’s studio. Her interpretation of it today largely reflects Picasso’s views about his 1906 painting of Gertrude Stein, namely that Stein would become more and more like the woman he had painted. Pierre Daix – Piccaso biographer, art critic and, for a time, Riffaud’s husband – concurred, arguing that Picasso used portraiture not as a ‘testing ground’ for his ability to capture (or fragment) resemblance, but as ‘a way of affirming that he was painting the archetypal [person], beyond the circumstances of her daily life, rendered as she would look for eternity’.1 The Resistance heroine was thus drawn by an artist who believed his representations of people would also be résistant – resistant to time, an enduring statement about who a person was and who they would become.
