Dora Maar, Picasso’s mistress and friend from 1935 to 1945, recorded the story of this tragic period in numerous photo reportages. She was a committed artist and a member of the Surrealist group, but she was also the model and inspiration for a large number of portraits or weeping or imploring women, women sitting in chairs or wearing hats, chimaeras, female sphinxes and mythological creatures who people Picasso’s oeuvre. This creative dialogue between the painter and the photographer “who was inclined to rages and outbursts” serves as a chronological and thematic guide within the exhibition, shedding light both on the plastic revolutions in Picasso’s art and on the major events that scarred the early years of the century. Fresh information contributed by the recent inventory of the works, photographs and records kept by Dora Maar, which entered the national collections in 1998 with the Markovitch payment in kind and sales of the Picasso Succession, should lead to a decisive revision of the approach taken to this period.
To date, no systematic study has been made of the decade from 1935 to 1945 in Picasso’s oeuvre. Yet it was marked by a series of exceptional events and seems particularly significant in artistic terms. In 1935 Picasso suddenly stopped painting and spent nearly a year writing poetry. The hundreds of poems that he wrote in the semiautomatic style inspired by surrealist methods of creation are the prime source material for his initial relationship with the young photographer.
Picasso had been isolated by his success since the 1920s and Dora Maar drew him into the effervescence, debates, tensions and antagonism of life among the artists of the avant-garde. They shared the same affinities with surrealist circles, a similar Hispanic culture – she had lived in Argentina and spoke Spanish – and the same type of sensibility and political commitment.
With the Popular Front in France and civil war in Spain, Picasso returned to painting in 1936 and 1937 in a more radical vein, with propagandist and messianic aims that were new in his work. Dreams and Lies of Franco, Guernica, and variations on the theme of Weeping Woman form a cycle of unusual theoretical and plastic coherency. Dora Maar participated by assisting Picasso technically with research on glass negatives (1936 – 37), by making, with Guernica the first photographic record of a work in progress (1937), and by inspiring the figure of the Weeping Woman or the Imploring Woman (1938).
In 1938–39, Dora became the “model” of major sets of paintings on the theme of Seated Woman and Woman in a Hat which Picasso painted with unprecedented virulence and acid colours. In them he explored his relationships with Cezanne, Van Gogh and even Matisse, displaying great virtuosity. Although the impending war forms the background to the works in the 1939–41 period, the portraits of Dora Maar and the still lifes with a skull are explicitly crossed in studies of a disturbing strangeness, in which life and death mimic one another. The large painting Serenade concentrates the terribilita of the war years; the naked body and the closed room evoke both confinement in a cell and the concentration camps to which Picasso consecrated the memento mori of his great painting The Charnel House in 1945.
From 1943, the relationship between Picasso and Dora Maar relentlessly crumbled. L’Histoire naturelle by Buffon, which Picasso had begun to illustrate in 1936 in the euphoric days of their relationship, was published about this time. In January 1947 he filled Dora’s copy with numerous drawings as if in a sign of farewell. This fantastic bestiary of hybrid human and animal forms is the epilogue to the legend, in which Dora as a female Sphinx and Picasso as the Minotaur stand face-to-face in a questioning stare.
