Looking for Dora Maar . . .
The mistress of Picasso who was a powerful artist in her own right
Hello! How are you? Well, I hope.
I got some good news last week. An essay that I wrote for Literary Hub has been accepted. Provisionally titled, “How Do We Tell the Stories of Picasso’s Mistresses?”—it is about the recent death of Francoise Gilot, who received lengthy obits in the New York Times and Washington Post, and how her life compares to that of Dora Maar, the surrealist photographer who was Picasso’s mistresses before Gilot. At its heart, the essay is about how we tell these women’s stories and what those stories mean to us. For earlier feminists it may have been enough to portray them as victims, but today we want more. We want to see their resiliency, too.
As I’ve mentioned here before, I did a residency at the Dora Maar House, in Menerbes, France, last October.
It was a rather lonely month, with a lot of time alone in my head, when I wasn’t really capable of writing much yet. I spent many hours reading everything I could find in the house and online about Dora Maar. I got to know her rather well, and I’ve written quite a bit about her. But only 1400 words made it into the essay that will be published at the end of July. I’ll share the link when it arrives, but for now I thought I’d share some of the stuff that didn’t make it into the piece.
Picasso’s Portraits of Dora Maar
There was a Picasso in the library of the Dora Maar House. A photograph of a Picasso, actually, Portrait de Dora Maar au Chignon, 1936, tucked into a bookshelf between the windows. The original print is in the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.
It’s not as lovely as some other portraits Picasso made of Dora Maar during that first year of their relationship. In this one, she has a rather stern look on her face, the ends of her mouth pointing down. But it reminds me of the simple, lovely portraits he did of her early on, before he began distorting her image beyond recognition in the famous “Weeping Woman” paintings.
Until then he had portrayed her whole, intact, and lovely. One sees in these pencil sketches or etchings the beauty that he saw: full-lashed eyes, the shape of her full lips, and the gentle curves of her profile. She is at peace, waiting for the session to be over, waiting for the touch of her lover.
In one stunning painting from 1938, Dora Maar sur la plage, she would be an alabaster Venus with her smooth, white skin, if it weren’t for her eyes. They welcome the viewer into a sea of tenderness. She presents no challenge to the viewer. There is no veil between her and the artist. She is as vast and open as the calm sea behind her.
These works are not by the Picasso we know. He’s not trying to do anything. He’s not distorting for effect or showing off. He’s just portraying the woman he loves. These early drawings and paintings of Dora Maar are the most beautiful pictures of his that I’ve ever seen.
They were all done in the first year or so of their relationship. Then came the bombing of Guernica, in Spain, in 1937, and his famous, monumental painting of that name. Dora was an integral part of its creation. More consciously anti-fascist than he was, she encouraged him to respond to the tragedy. Her features are also said to be present in the painting, in the face of the woman in the upper right, holding a light over the scene. That is what Dora did. She held up a light for him to paint by, figuratively and literally. She set up her studio lights and photographed the step-by-step creation of his masterpiece.
In the middle of 1937, Picasso’s view of her as his model changed. She is no longer Dora Maar, the beloved object—“Adora,” he called her—she is “The Weeping Woman.” Apparently Dora sat still for long periods while he did these distorted portraits of her. Many who have written about Maar view the paintings as grotesque misrepresentations, performing a kind of violence on Dora herself, on the integrity of her personhood.
But Anne Baldassari, director of the Musée Picasso in Paris, disagrees with such “simplistic psychological speculations.” Dora was an ideal model for him during those turbulent years of the Spanish Civil War and WWII, she suggests, because “her intense artistic sensibility, her poetic gifts, her ability to participate in his suffering, would represent a means of focusing and reflecting his inner torments.” Her face became a mirror in which he saw his own pain reflected. Baldassari sees the nature of their relationship as “empathetic and projective” rather than exploitative. I’m frankly not buying it.
Whose image was he painting? Was it Dora? He later said of her, “For me she’s the weeping woman. For years I’ve painted her tortured form, not through sadism, and not with pleasure, either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me. It was the deep reality, not the superficial one.” Or was it Picasso? She later said of the various portraits he did of her that none of them was her; they were all Picasso. Or was it some combination of the two? Baldassari writes of “the double identity in the [Weeping Woman] work, the employment of the female model to express what the painter—a man mourning for his country at war—could not claim without revealing too much of himself.” In Baldassari’s eyes, Dora shared his feelings so deeply, they were so much in sympathy with each other, it’s as if a beautiful collaboration of two souls into one great work of art has occurred. Maybe.
It’s Picasso’s name on the painting, but it’s Dora Maar who became forever associated with the grotesque, distorted images. While he could absorb the personality of his lover/muse/model and use it to further his own fame, what was she was left with? In the end, an apartment full of distorted representations of herself, reminders of his power to devour and consume her for his own ends—a fortune, if she wanted to sell it. She did not.
Dora Maar kept her rue de Savoie flat much as it was at the end of their relationship in 1945, a kind of shrine to the nearly decade-long ordeal of loving Picasso and being loved by him. She actually hung on to every little scrap and doodle he did. She knew they were worth more because she owned them. Paintings, many of them fractured, twisted, renderings of her likeness, filled the walls. In one seemingly more straight-forward portrait, half of her face and head were missing. Another depicted her voluptuous naked body writhing under the arms of a looming minotaur about to ravish her, her gaze averted as if in resignation against the coming violation she is powerless to deflect. The minotaur, of course, was the artist’s representation of himself.
She did sell a few of his paintings late in life for funds to live on. But mostly they were auctioned off after her death. Does it help that the Centre Pompideau and the Tate Gallery staged a retrospective of her art work in 2019 in an attempt to correct the “weeping woman” image of her? She has received an anthill of recognition, nearly all of it in the last decade, compared to what he has received for this series of paintings of her alone.
It’s not really a question of who deserves more attention, though. For me, it’s a question of who gets to tell the story.
Biographies of Dora Maar
Dora Maar by Victoria Combalia, published in 2013, is the authoritative biography, as I understand. It has not been translated into English. It is also the only biography of Maar currently in print in the US.
I read two earlier works in English that I found in the library at the Dora Maar House. However, I found them quite frustrating. She disappears from view for large parts of what is supposed to be her story. We rarely hear her voice. The men around her dominate and we see her largely through their eyes.
What I learned was that Picasso devoured her, convinced her that painting was a higher art than photography, at which she excelled, having become a well-regarded Surrealist artist who created haunting, dreamlike photomontages. (A couple of these hung on the walls of my bedroom.)
I learned that Dora and Picasso (she never called him Pablo) endured the war in Occupied Paris. She complained once of him leaving her often to “die of boredom,” not allowing her to make plans, but also not making plans with her, just deciding at last minute whether to lunch or dine with her. During their relationship, which lasted almost 10 years, she began to die inside. She didn’t have her art, him, or her self-respect.
In 1944, Picasso traded in 37-year-old Dora Maar for 22-year-old art student Francoise Gilot. He strung Dora along, though, tormenting her further with comparisons to his other lovers. In 1946, Dora had a mental collapse. Picasso said he left her out of fear of her madness. Again, he controls the narrative. It is so frustrating!
Dora stayed in a psychiatric hospital for 12 days, undergoing electroshock therapy, after which her friend Lee Miller said she was never the same. Dora said she didn’t kill herself as Picasso expected her to, so as “not to give him the pleasure.”
Afterwards, she retreated to Menerbes, inhabiting the house that Picasso had bought for her with one of his paintings. It was a parting gift, in a way. What a relief it must have been for her to escape the claustrophobia of her Parisian apartment to the vast, open spaces of the Vaucluse landscape, which spread out before her home in Menerbes, where not a single work of Picasso marred the walls. Instead, it was her art that gradually filled the high-ceilinged rooms.
She lived there for 50 long years, during the summers, and in her Paris apartment in the winters. She became a recluse, dropped most of her friendships, devoted herself to her painting, for which she received little recognition, and became a devout Catholic, living a nun-like existence —for FIFTY years!
I found this all quite painful to read. Why did I care so much? Why did it matter to me that she went mad, clung to her memories of him, and became a recluse? Why did I want things to have been different for her? Perhaps because I was hoping to learn something from her—maybe gain some kind of courage from her story. She was alone for 50 fifty years, alone meaning no man in her life. Why do we call women without male partners “alone”? Why do we pity them and even suspect some kind of madness, because why else would a woman choose to live alone, especially for five decades?
I did, eventually, learn more about Dora’s post-Picasso life. But it took some digging and, as I describe in the Lit Hub piece, some use of google translate. The director of the Dora Maar House also told me that she thought Dora Maar found peace in her solitude. She and her friend, Jacqueline Lamba, who had been married to André Breton, both became “recluses” after their “genius” men more or less destroyed them. Jacqueline lived not far away, and they remained good friends. Both retreated into their art from the world that would define them only through Picasso and Breton. If they tried to exhibit their work, everyone would compare them to those men. But they both kept creating art.
I love the idea of these two independent women supporting each other, understanding each other, and finding themselves in their art again. They had, in fact, first met in art school in Paris, years before they would meet these men. I wish someone would write about the two of them and their friendship.
That’s all for now. And I’ll be hopping into your mailbox again soon with more stories of writers and artists. Traveling like this has opened my horizons far beyond the American women writers I’ve studied, and I’ve encountered quite a few interesting ones that have helped me think through some of the issues I’ve been grappling with as I change my life. I look forward to sharing more with you soon!
All the best,
Anne
Thank you so much for this, Anne. Fifty years of glorious solitude makes me envious of her. I was 62 when I left my last marriage and, leaving that stress behind, embraced solitude. If I long for anything it is many more years of such “aloneness” that so many people misunderstand.
Thank you. What an insightful read.