The meeting of Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar is legendary. It took place in January 1936 at Café Deux Magots in Paris when Picasso noticed a brunette sitting at one of the tables. Maar, aware of his attention, ceremoniously took off her gloves, laid one hand spread out on the wooden table, and stuck a knife in between her fingers, going at faster speeds and higher heights each time, even drawing blood. Picasso was captivated, remarked so to his friend in Spanish, and was surprised when Maar answered. Born in France to a Croatian father, Maar spent her childhood in Argentina, where her family worked for the Austria-Hungarian embassy, so she was fluent in several languages.
Man Ray’s famous photograph of Maar, 1936
Other men may have been mortified by the scene of self-torture and mutilation. Not so with Picasso. Obsessed with bullfights and whose life and art would be driven by so much drama, he felt he had met his match. He went home with Maar’s bloodstained glove in his pocket and placed it in a display case, already she a kind of trophy.
Dora Maar, Untitled (1933)
Dora Maar and the Surrealists
Even before they met, Maar was already a well-known photographer. She worked in fashion and advertising, even opening her own studio in 1931. Her commissions included magazine spreads for Madame Figaro and Art et Métiers Graphiques. She was also one of the few women at the forefront of the Surrealist movement. Founded in 1924 by writer and theorist André Breton and inspired by the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, Surrealism’s goal was to unlock the power of dreams and the unconscious. Famed members included Dalí, Miró, Man Ray, Giacometti and Frida Kahlo.
Dora Maar, Adventure on the High Seas (circa 1920s)
Maar was introduced to Breton by George Bataille, her lover for a year from 1933 to 1934. Bataille, a philosopher and leftist revolutionary whose essays and novels explored anthropology, eroticism and mysticism, would become instrumental in later schools of sociology and philosophy. Their brief relationship is shrouded in tales of sadomasochism and sexual carnality.
Around this time with Bataille and the Surrealists, Maar began to experiment with her photography. Her eerie and dream-like photomontages became examples of the movement. And her portraits became increasingly sexual and pornographic, as evident in the erotic studies of model Assia Granatouroff. One would even appear in the soft-core magazine Seduction in 1934.
Dora Maar, Photo of Assia (1934)
Maar was also politically active. When the Great Depression spread far and wide in Europe, she traveled to the outskirts of Paris, London, Barcelona and other major cities to photograph those affected by unemployment and poverty. Her photo documentary exposed the most harrowing conditions in the poorest neighborhoods. Once, she crashed her friends’ ski holiday to visit a coal mine atop Alpe d’Huez. Despite never having skied in her life, she trudged up the slopes to bear witness to the dehumanizing conditions of miners slaving away with pickaxes all winter, waist-deep in icy waters. During the rising fascism in Europe, she participated in petitions and demonstrations against right-wing nationalists.
Dora Maar, Money and Morals (1934)
The Birth of Picasso
Picasso’s genius as an artist was a birthright. His father, José, was himself a painter, a teacher of academic art, and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Málaga. Born in 1881, Picasso is said to have learned how to draw before he could speak, imitating his father’s drawings from an early age and saying “píz” (lapíz for pencil) for his very first word. He entered art school when he was ten, and legend has it that at 13, his father gave up painting altogether and gifted him all the art supplies because the son had already obviously surpassed the father as an artist. The same year, José arranged for a showing of his son’s works and sold several pieces without the buyers realizing the artist was barely a teenager.
At 14, he was accepted to the Barcelona School of Fine Arts. He was much younger than the other students but more talented than even his teachers. At 16, he entered the Royal Academy in Madrid, the most renowned art school in Spain, but found the classes mostly uninspiring. The following years saw the rise of anarchy and modernism and his artistic style thrived, evident in the bold sketches of people and landscapes he made then.
Dora Maar, Two paintings of Picasso (1937)
Paris and Picasso
At 18, one of Picasso’s paintings was chosen for the Spanish pavilion of the World Fair in Paris. His work was soon to be exhibited in front of an international audience of thousands. In Paris, the epicenter of the avant-garde, he found excitement and inspiration in the bohemian lifestyle and the endless galleries of fine art. At the exposition, he was dazzled by the Impressionist paintings of Manet, Renoir and Degas. In Montmartre, he became part of an elite art world that included Cézanne, Monet, Matisse and Toulouse-Lautrec. He took after their colorful styles, selling his painted renditions of nightlife and the dancehalls.
In the following year, 1901, Picasso was contracted to fill a show for a Parisian art dealer at the same time that his best friend, Casagemas, committed suicide after being spurned by a girl he had fallen in love with. The Paris studio Casagemas used was already paid for, and Picasso moved in to paint and prepare for the show. Haunted by his friend’s death, the somber paintings would later be labeled his Blue Period. And a dedication on one of the paintings he exhibited would later give away his scandalous affair with Germaine, the same girl who had broken his friend’s heart.
It wasn’t until 1904 that Picasso moved to Paris permanently. Within a year, he would find his first major collector and patron in Gertrude and Leo Stein, siblings who already owned several Renoirs, Matisses and Gaugins. The art collection at their home in Montparnasse continuously attracted other artists, writers and intellectuals. The gatherings became the famed salons whose regular guest lists included Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, to name a few.
A recreation of the Stein salon at the 2016 LA Art Fair
Dora Maar and Picasso
While Maar is often mentioned as just one of Picasso’s many muses, the fact of the matter is she greatly influenced his art, perhaps more than anyone else. After a childhood split between Paris and Buenos Aires, she studied art and photography at Académie Julian, École Beaux-Arts and École Technique before training with Cubist painter André Lhote. She would become an established photographer, an admired Surrealist, and a talented poet and painter in her own right. She was outspoken, opinionated, worldly, multilingual, and the only woman he felt was his true intellectual equal. So it should be no surprise that beyond the café theatrics of their first meeting, Picasso would become completely enamored by her.
Their first year together was marked by incredible output by both artists. He made countless sketches and paintings of her and she took what would become among the most iconic photographs of him.
Dora Maar, Photo of Picasso in her apartment, circa 1942
Guernica and the Weeping Woman
The year of their meeting also saw the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Although Picasso had never been overtly political, he was distraught at the conflict ravaging his country. He found solace in being able to talk about it with Maar and her social activism and anti-fascist stance influenced his worldview and inspired his sympathies for the left.
In January 1937, the Spanish Republican government commissioned Picasso to paint a mural for the upcoming World’s Fair in Paris. Maar found him a larger studio on the top floor of a 17th-century mansion. Coincidentally the fictional setting of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, the studio became where Picasso would paint his.
Picasso’s studio at 7 Rue Grand Augustins
In February, right-wing rebels under General Francisco Franco took Málaga, Picasso’s hometown, and began a naval blockade. But it wouldn’t be until the events of April 26, when Guernica was targeted, that Picasso would find his inspiration for the mural. Most of the male inhabitants were off fighting with the Republicans while women and children remained. The defenseless Basque town was bombed and razed to the ground by German Nazis aligned with Franco.
Photos of the atrocity were published in L’Humanité three days later and both Picasso and Maar were devastated. Again, he found solace in being able to talk about the events with her as she had been a left-wing activist for years. He began sketches immediately and she offered him support and inspiration. He worked frantically for the next month while she came every day to photograph the progress of his painting. The black-and-white photographs Maar herself developed inside his studio clearly influenced the monochrome colors Picasso used.
Dora Maar, photo of Picasso painting Guernica (1937)
Guernica was unveiled in July 1937 at the Spanish Pavilion of the World Fair, alongside other sketches and poems Picasso had published under the title The Dream and Lie of Franco. Just down the hall were the pavilions of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
One figure from Guernica that would reappear in subsequent paintings is the Weeping Woman. In Guernica, she may have been portrayed as a victim of war. But in real life, the weeping woman was inspired by none other than Dora Maar. Her bouts of depression and anxiety were exacerbated during their tortuous affair. Both her intellect and cycles of jealousy did much to nourish his paintings and poetry. She helped fuel his art and he made numerous renditions of her in The Weeping Woman series.
Dora Maar, Weeping Woman (1937). Picasso always said “I don’t give, I take.” But here perhaps, Maar takes a little back in painting his famous painting.
Summers in Mougins
Picasso and Maar’s first two summers together were spent in Mougins, a small town nestled in the French Riviera. They were in the company of other couples, including poet Paul Éluard and his wife Nusch, artist Man Ray and his mistress, Ady, surrealists husband and wife André Breton and Jacqueline Lamba, and British collector Robert Penrose and future wife Lee Miller.
Firsthand accounts, sordid tales and pornographic photographs would attest to the intense affairs and ménage à trois of those summers. Man Ray and Lee Miller were once lovers. Nusch, Ady, and Lee became very close and were often photographed by Ray, often together, often naked. Picasso invented a game of name-swapping that went further after their wine-soaked evenings. With Paul’s blessing, Nusch became Picasso’s muse and sometimes lover, evident in his paintings of her. Man Ray’s film Un été à la Garoupe more than hinted at many of these flings.
Maar, Nusch, Picasso and Éluard in Mougins
Maar, who had also taken some of the most famous photographs of the group that summer, seems absent from those tales. There are no accounts of her partaking. These free-spirited summers came to an end as German occupation began to spread in Europe during the onset of WWII.
Picasso’s Other Women
Picasso had many women. Even in his youth, he was possessive and unsympathetic. One of his first girlfriends, Fernande Olivier, who inspired one of the figures in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, was sometimes locked in and kept from going out. In the midst of his first marriage to ballerina Olga Khokhlova, he began an affair with Marie-Thérèse Walker. He was forty-five and she was seventeen. He fathered a child each with both of them.
He had just separated from Olga when he met Maar. And he didn’t keep it a secret that he spent his days with Maar before going home at night to Marie-Thérèse. Even when the two women confronted each other at his studio, it only fueled his art and ego. He often painted the two in similar postures, as if always in comparison. Maar, though desperate and heartbroken, remained Picasso’s loyal lover. She even put aside photography to focus on painting at his insistence.
Dora Maar, Alarm Clock (1940)
During WWII and the Occupation, Picasso and Maar stayed in Paris. Those were the most harrowing years of their lives. They watched thousands deported, including some of their friends. One painter, Max Jacobs, died in a camp in Drancy. Art supplies were hard to come by. Picasso drew on every cut of paper he could find and made sculptures from scraps of metal. Everyone lived in fear. Picasso’s infidelities further strained Maar’s mental instability, and war and anxiety took a toll on both of them. In 1943, he met aspiring artist Françoise Gilot (she was 21 and he was 61, the same age as her grandmother) and eventually left Maar.
“After Picasso, Only God”
Soon after their affair ended in 1945, Maar suffered a complete nervous breakdown. She had been acting strangely and, after she was found sitting naked at her stairwell, her friends committed her to a psychiatric hospital. She then began therapy with psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, seeing him weekly for two years. It was also around this time she began to explore other occult beliefs. After a brief Buddhist period, she turned to and became utterly devoted to the Roman Catholic Church. Dr. Lacan admitted that he allowed her to turn to religion in the hopes that it would save her from her own madness.
Dora Maar, The Quays of The Seine (1940)
Although Maar never really got over Picasso, famously saying, “After Picasso, there’s only God,” she kept her friendships within the Surrealist circle and other influential people in Paris. She took up photography once more and continued to paint, mostly still lifes and landscapes, her style furthering from Picasso’s gaze.
Those who knew her remember that she never once lost her striking intelligence. Lengthy letters among friends discussed philosophy, literature, art and religion. Her bookcases and studio were overflowing. And while her life and work were eclipsed by Picasso’s, there was a steady interest in her paintings and photographs. She became more solitary in later years but continued to exhibit until her death in 1997. She was also writing poetry in a hidden notebook all along, recovered posthumously.
“In the secret of myself to my secret self
living you have me live –
In this room I’ve lived out madness and fear
Exile is vast but it’s summer, silence
in the sunlight a place of peace where the soul
invents only joy on the road to home.”
The Recluse, Dora Maar
