Episode #111: Modern Love--Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso (Season 13, Episode 4)
Listeners, I heard you—a bunch of self-admitting hopeless romantics who wanted to hear more about people bound by attraction, fascination. By love. Though there are examples of romantic and sexual relationships between creators that are sprinkled throughout art history as we know it, it’s true that we have the most information about relationships from folks who lived in the last century—because we have greater access to documentation recording the lives of these people, and because, as the 20th century progressed, people—artists, perhaps especially—became more vocal about their relationships, less inhibited. Modern artists, artists especially from the first half of the 20th century, lived their art, and their relationships, out loud-- writing about them, talking about them, and sometimes even creating works of art about them.
This season, I’m rounding up stories about modern artists in love, in lust, in relationships— digging into these individuals, see how their liaisons, marriages, affairs, and connections played in or on their respective works of art, and how, if anything, they affected art history as we know it. I, for one, believe that it’s time for Modern Love.
Today: we’re discussing the lives and loves of Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar.
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Episode Credits:
Research by Madison Jones. Production and Editing by Kaboonki. Theme music by Alex Davis. Additional music by Storyblocks. Logo by Vaulted.co.
ArtCurious is sponsored by Anchorlight, an interdisciplinary creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle.
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Episode Transcript
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You know how lots of times celebrities end up marrying other celebrities? It’s a power play a lot of the time, a way to merge two bright and shiny people into one bright and shiny partnership. Now, I, for one, cannot speak to this kind of relationship unless you count two independent podcasters as a “celebrity couple,” which would be delusional, but I’ve also thought that the whole celebrity relationship thing is probably built, for many, on one additional thing: understanding. Famous people who live their lives in the limelight understand the pressures, the worries, the pleasure, the pain. You would just get each other’s lives and careers in a way that 99% of the world just wouldn’t. But if you are involved with someone who isn’t intimately familiar with what fame entails, well, that might end up being a liability in a relationship. But when two well-known and well-appreciated individuals come together, that doesn’t mean that it’s automatically a match made in heaven, right? Sometimes, no matter what, it can be a match made in hell.
Some people think that visual art is dry, boring, lifeless. But the stories behind those paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs are weirder, more outrageous, or more fun than you can imagine. ArtCurious Season 13 is all about Modern Love, and today we’re homing in on one of the lustiest—and misogynistic—artists of the 20th century. And while I had many a lady love of his to choose from, there’s one artist who most keenly seems like this icon’s modern love match—at least for a brief time. Today we’re discussing the lives and loves of Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar. This is the ArtCurious Podcast, exploring the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in Art History. I'm Jennifer Dasal.
How do you choose which of Picasso’s wives or lovers to discuss in a season all about relationships in art? I really had almost a dozen to choose from, but ultimately I felt I had to go with Dora Maar because she was an artist, too—a well-known, respected artist—and one who was working actively years before she ended up dallying with Senor Picasso. Maar was born in 1907 as Henriette Theodora Marković, the daughter of a French mother and a Croatian Father who lived in Paris. Papa Marković, an architect, moved the family to Buenos Aires for work, and it was there that the future Dora Maar was raised before she opted to return to Paris in 1926 at the age of 19 to pursue an education and experience in the fine arts. Henriette, you see, wanted to paint, and of course there were no better art schools in the world than in Paris, so she settled there, taking classes at a wealth of studios and ateliers: Central Union of Decorative Arts, the School of Photography, the Ecole des Beaux-arts, Académie Julian, and even the atelier of André Lhote, a French Cubist painter. But it was a meeting with the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson that truly changed her life. Cartier-Bresson, one of the most famed photographers of the 20th century, mingled with Henriette at Lhote’s studio, and in conversation, he ultimately suggested two things to the burgeoning artist: first, that she should try photography—she might really like it, would probably be really good at it. And second, she should consider shortening her name to something a bit snappier. And thus, Dora Maar, as we know her, had arrived.
The next decade of Dora Maar’s life proved to be one of the most formative and most fascinating, and it makes sense to note that several books have been written just about her during this pre-Picasso phase, because the woman herself, and her many interests, are fascinating. She mingled in Paris with pals in the Surrealist art community, became an ardent socialist involved with the anti-capitalist group October, mixed and mingled with lifelong friends like poets Andre Breton and Paul Éluard (callback to our first episode of this season on Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, and also: keep a pin in Paul Éluard, because we’ll be coming back to him in a moment), and surrealist Jacqueline Lamba. She shared a photography studio with another incredibly famous photographer, Brassaï. She was Man Ray’s studio assistant and model. She got an in as a fashion photographer, creating gorgeous photo spreads and advertisements, all while upping her game as a fine art photographer. I mean, this lady was incredible.
By the mid-1930s, Dora Maar was firmly established in the world of the French avant-garde, living her best life, experimenting with photographic techniques that were at the forefront of the medium: creating double exposures and superimpositions, playing with angles and perspective, and forming odd and awe-inspiring collages and photomontages. Surrealism continued to conjure inspiration for Maar, and her black-and-white images still beguile and confuse. Her most famous piece is probably a photograph Maar titled Père Ubu, after a character in the absurdist play Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry, a satirical take on Shakespearean dramas like Hamlet and King Lear. Now, a quick bit of background if you are new to Jarry’s work. The title character, Ubu, is a terrible dictator whose failings and faults are manifested in his outward appearance, begetting a monster rather than a man. Written in 1896, Ubu Roi was ahead of its time, and subsequently became beloved within Dada and Surrealist circles, so Dora Maar is not alone in her admiration for this bizarre piece of literature. But she created one of the most iconic takes on the character with Père Ubu. This black-and-white image is a close-up, strangely angled view of a creature, probably a fetal or baby armadillo, whom Maar photographed almost head-on so that its bulbous head and floppy ears take center stage, followed closely by the animal’s curved and clawed forearms. Maar never actually revealed the source of her image, but scholars believe that it is indeed an armadillo, but what is known for sure is that the work was sensational. It became almost a kind of surrealist calling card, reproduced in art magazines and journals, and seen on postcards throughout Europe. It’s the perfect Dora Maar photograph: mysterious, disturbing, a work that pulls upon a well of horrors beneath it, a smart and knowing wink to the art consumed by the cool kids, of which we can certainly count Dora Maar as one.
But that cool kid’s life was about to change, big time, and not necessarily for the better. That’s coming up next. Right after this quick ad break—remember that you can join us over on Patreon for a few bucks a month and get this show ad-free: patreon.com/artcurious.
Welcome back to ArtCurious.
In late 1935, Dora Maar was at the height of her photography career, using her spare time to create mind-bending and eye-catching works like Le Simulateur, where she manipulates both her subject—an acrobat—and the setting around him into a nightmarish scene. She was also still using her awesome skills to get more straightforward work, which is how she found herself working as an on-set photographer for films like Jean Renoir’s The Crime of Monsieur Lange. On set one day, she spotted a man with piercing eyes, his hair parted severely to one side and just beginning to be streaked with gray. And she knew immediately who he was. He was Pablo Picasso, a man whose name had been synonymous with modern art for the better part of thirty years at this point. How could anyone in the art world not know who Picasso was by the mid-1930s? He was the artist that broke art wide open with Cubism, who continued to poke and prod at its seams to produce some of the most enduring works from the first half of the 20th century. He also produced a lot of broken hearts and broken homes along the way. I’m not sure if Dora Maar knew that when she first spotted the artist on that film set, but if she did, she perhaps chose to ignore any pangs of doubt or warning. He caught her eye, and she wanted to have him.
Here on ArtCurious we’ve covered Pablo Picasso a few times—first in his rivalry with Henri Matisse, returning him again in our “Shock Art” season to discuss his 1907 breakthrough painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and again in discussing his Les Femmes d’Alger in our episodes about the most expensive works of art ever sold at auction. You can tell by the themes here that I’m going for both art history and juicy art gossip, both of which are rife with material when it comes to Picasso. And I’m not going to cover a whole lot of his biography today, since we’ve traced that road a few times before. But what I haven’t talked about much is Picasso’s infamous relationships. And there’s a lot that can be said—so much, too much. But the fact of the matter is that it ain’t pretty. Picasso was a rampant misogynist, an egotist, even a sadist, according to some. The plain truth is that he didn’t treat women well, and his biography is littered with the names of women he wronged and the tragedy of their responses to him: Olga Khokhlova, his first wife, whom he painted as a grotesque in works like Bust of a Woman with Self-Portrait, where Olga is a screaming succubus, a cartoon-like pink mass over whose shoulder the shadow of Picasso, as a framed silhouette, literally hangs. Picasso, by the way, refused to divorce Olga even though they parted ways in the early ‘30s, because of that old chestnut, the “not wanting the wife to get half your stuff” excuse. Their marriage only officially ended when Olga died in the 1950s. So, that’s nice. Then there’s Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s second wife, who was involved with the artist for the last 11 years of his life, after having met him when he was in his early 70s and she in her mid-20s. She was so warped by their relationship that after the artist’s death in 1973, she forbade members of the extended Picasso family, including his children Claude and Paloma, from attending his funeral. And though she went on to live for more than a decade past her husband, she never fully escaped him—and it’s believed that her grief over that relationship drove her to commit suicide in the 1980s. And she wasn’t the first. The tragic Marie-Therese Walter, considered Picasso’s so-called “golden muse” and his most famous mistress, also took her own life, as did Picasso’s grandson. So it’s safe to say that no one was left unscarred, really, and Marina Picasso, the artist’s granddaughter, put it best in her 2001 memoir, Picasso: My Grandfather. In it, she writes, quote, “No one in my family ever managed to escape from the stranglehold of this genius. He needed blood to sign each of his paintings: my father’s blood, my brother’s my mother’s my grandmother’s, and mine. He needed the blood of those who loved him.”
But this is really unromantic of me to share all of this before really introducing the relationship between Picasso and Dora Maar—and for that I do apologize, but also: it’s just really hard for me to see that charming, romantic side of the artist when so much ink has been spilled about his awfulness. What’s fascinating, though, is that their relationship began with blood being spilled. They didn’t actually meet that day on the Jean Renoir movie set. They would officially meet several days later after being introduced by Paul Éluard at the famous Café Les Deux Magots in Paris, where legend has it that she caught the artist’s attention by playing that carnival-style knife game where she splayed her fingers out and stabbed at the table between them, narrowly avoiding stabbing herself only occasionally. According to Françoise Gilot, yet another of Picasso’s lovers, who later wrote about the scene, Dora Maar occasionally missed—whether it be on accident or on purpose, we may never know—and she cut her fingers, soaking her gloves in her own spilled blood. Picasso approached her and asked: could he keep her now-ruined gloves? She assented. And thus, their relationship began, carrying on for nine years.
Not that Picasso, at the very least, was faithful to Dora and Dora only. When the pair met, not only was he still married to Olga Khokhlova, but he was also having affairs with several other women, including the Surrealist poet Alice Paalen, Valentine Hugo, who was André Breton’s former mistress, and Marie-Therese Walter, who some considered to be the antithesis of Dora Maar. Where Marie-Therese had been rather innocent when she met Picasso, Dora had been worldly, cultured. That intellectual challenge was one of the things that drew Picasso to her- and he apparently used this to his advantage, outwardly comparing the two women to undermine Maar’s confidences and inspiring feelings of competition in them. Picasso thrived when he triggered jealously in others.
But of course it wasn’t all bad—it couldn’t have been, to go on for so many years. And they acted as mutual muses for one another. For better or for worse, we know that the women in Picasso’s life were his muses. But here, too, Dora Maar gets a turn at the glory, creating indelible images of Picasso, her lover. Her gorgeous black-and-white images of him are stunning, straightforward, and yet skillfully produced. And it’s not just her portraits of the artist that are fascinating, but her documentation of him and his work, too. Maar was a witness to the making of Picasso’s incredible work, his 1937 masterpiece Guernica, when no one else could see it. Maar recorded the artist at work on the piece, creating an indelible resource and work of art simultaneously. At the same time, the lovers also inspired one another and shared their own artistic gifts. Picasso inspired Dora Maar to take up painting again, and it’s really kind of fun to see paintings of hers, like her 1936 pastel, Portrait of Pablo Picasso, which presents him in a Cubist-inspired style that is so reminiscent of Picasso’s works themselves. It’s like Picasso has been Picasso-ed. Likewise, Picasso took up photography and experimented with new types of printmaking under her tutelage. Both artists expanded their worlds and their oeuvres with the help of the other.
In the annals of art history and in popular imagination, though, it is, of course, Picasso who benefitted most from their partnership. Dora Maar not only became his muse, one in a long line of lovers whose visage he put to canvas, but she became one of his iconic faces: Picasso’s so-called Weeping Woman. We’ll get to that –and all its implications—right after another break. Come right back.
Welcome back to ArtCurious.
The “Weeping Woman” isn’t just one work of art. It’s a whole series of paintings that was conceived around the same time and within the same vein as Guernica, and indeed one of the key figures in Guernica is a weeping woman. The two cannot be separated: the weeping woman is a response, as Guernica is, to the Spanish Civil War that broke out in 1937 and so scarred Picasso, being a native Spaniard. He knew he wanted to create an image of a devastated woman, a heartbreaking and heartbroken mother, perhaps—and he needed a model. So naturally, he went to Dora Maar. According to the catalogue entry about The Weeping Woman that is now in the collection of the Tate in London notes something interesting in that the images of Dora Maar as the “Weeping Woman” mark an important transition not only in Picasso’s imagery of Maar herself, but in their relationship—a kind of turning point. Previous to creating the Weeping Woman, Picasso’s portraits of Maar had been kinder, or at least softer in some ways, if such a word can be used to describe what are still rather prickly, jagged portraits, like his 1937 Portrait of Dora Maar, now in the Musée Picasso in Paris. The Weeping Woman, though, is all about pain. Dora Maar, identifiable in Picasso's works by her long dark hair, is rendered in that typical Cubist style. We see her mouth open, her teeth in a painful grimace, shown through hands that are simultaneously depicted as covering up those teeth, while another hand dabs at the corners of that mouth with a handkerchief. Maar’s face is made blotchy with yellows, greens, and purples, and a strangely bright and jaunty hat, bedecked with a red flower, sits incongruously on her head. This image of Dora Maar became, for the artist, the epitome of her. In her 1964 book, Life with Picasso, Francoise Gilot recalls Picasso’s thoughts on Dora Maar, writing, quote, “an artist isn't as free as he sometimes appears. It's the same way with the portraits I've done of Dora Maar. I couldn't make a portrait of her laughing. For me she's the weeping woman. For years I've painted her in torture forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me.” Without any say, Dora Maar has forever become Picasso’s “Weeping Woman,” and she didn’t like it, with good reason. She later proclaimed, quote, “All (Picasso’s) portraits of me are lies. They're Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar.”
British art historian John Richardson, one of the premiere experts on Pablo Picasso, once wrote a compelling examination of the “Weeping Woman” images and postulated that they may have just as much to do with Dora Maar’s experiences at Picasso’s hands as it did with the attack at Guernica. Picasso was apparently not only emotionally abusive and unfaithful but also physically violent with Maar (and others), as well. As their relationship progressed, things between them worsened, eventually leading Maar to experience a psychological breakdown when their relationship dissolved in the mid-1940s. Her portrait as a “Weeping Woman,” then, though Dora considered it a lie, might have at least some kernels of truth when viewed in this perspective. As Richardson writes, quote, “The source of Dora’s tears was not Franco [meaning general Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator], but the artist’s traumatic manipulation of her.”
I’m left to wonder how much, if any, long-term effects from his relationship with Dora Maar are visible in Picasso’s works. He seems, as always, to have jumped to a new muse (Francoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque in particular, and he may have carried on with Marie-Therese Walter for at least a while, especially since the two shared a daughter, Maya). I get the feeling that Picasso wasn’t too big on self-reflection, though I might be wrong, and he was probably equally disinterested in self-flagellation. So he may have moved on from his tormented relationship with Dora Maar unscathed. Maar, though, was not as lucky. As I mentioned previously, she suffered an emotional collapse that was concurrent with her break from Picasso, though the deaths of her mother and sister during the same period also played a serious role. When she recovered and was finally released from her treatment facility, she moved to a home in the South of France to begin life anew. But even then, scars remained. During their time together, after their initial mutual obsession wore off, Picasso began to grow increasingly critical of Dora Maar’s artistic output, eventually declaring that photography, as an artistic medium, wasn’t a worthy use of her time, nor a worthy pursuit for any artist. Remember that Dora was not only an extremely gifted photographer, but also an important and experimental one. This was akin to calling her life’s work—and possibly her life—meaningless. Picasso didn’t encourage Maar to stop creating entirely, but convinced her that painting was the grandest art, the highest form—something akin to that age-old argument of paragone that we’ve mentioned a few times on the podcast—this concept of one art form being better than another. But instead of pitting painting and sculpture against each other, Picasso argued for the supremacy of painting over photography. And Dora, unfortunately, felt compelled to give in.
The good news, though, is that she was a good painter, too—had always been—and so pursuing a creative path in this way wasn’t a terrible option. Throughout the second half of her life, far away from Picasso, she did indeed paint, moving gradually further and further away from representing the world around her and further into abstraction Much of these works, though, she seemed to have kept for herself. It wasn’t until her death in 1997 at age 89 that a great cache of paintings was discovered in her Paris apartment—a startling find that led to a gradual renaissance in our understandings of Dora Maar as an artist, as a person—someone far greater than the reductive concept of her as a muse, as the “Weeping Woman.” She loved Picasso once, yes, it was true… but she shone brightly both before and after their ill-fated relationship. And the world has finally begun to realize that, with exhibitions dedicated to her works flourishing across the globe over the last twenty years, with shows in Barcelona, in Munich, in Paris and beyond, and including a landmark show in 2019 at the Tate Modern in London. Picasso and Maar both influenced one another and gained artistic experience at each other’s hands. But I, for one, am so happy to know that the time has truly come to experience Dora Maar, a true survivor, on her own terms, and outside of Picasso’s overbearing shadow.
Next time on ArtCurious, we’re heading into nearly uncharted territory on ArtCurious with a love triangle for the (Modern) ages. And no, it’s not Gala and Paul Éluard and Max Ernst again. It’s even bigger than that.
Thank you for listening to the ArtCurious Podcast. This episode was written, produced, and narrated by me, Jennifer Dasal. HUGE thanks to Madison Jones for her great writing and research help for this episode. The ArtCurious theme music is by Alex Davis at alexdavismusic.com, and our podcast is co-produced by Kaboonki - podcasts, creative video, and more. Subscribe to their show, Subgenre, a podcast about the movies, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at subgenrepodcast.com. Kaboonki: Leave your mark. The ArtCurious Podcast is sponsored primarily by Anchorlight. Anchorlight is a creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space, Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle. Please visit anchorlightraleigh.com.
The ArtCurious Podcast is also fiscally sponsored by VAE Raleigh, a 501c3 nonprofit creativity incubator, which means you can donate tax-free to ArtCurious to show your support, and you can join us at Patreon for the price of a cup of coffee. Check back with us soon as we explore some of the most unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful Modern art lovers in art history.
