11/24/2023 0 Comments Man seeking woman bookBooks on Maar tend to view this famous series as grotesque misrepresentations that perform a kind of violence. The most famous one, in the Tate, is painted in putrid yellow, absinthe green, and tomato red. In these Dora appears with distorted, chopped-up features. Then, amidst his work on Guernica and the emotional turmoil of Picasso’s continued affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, the mother of his second child, he made the dozens of “Weeping Woman” portraits. Early on he made simple, adoring portraits of her, as in Dora Maar on the Beach, in which she appears whole, intact, and lovely, an alabaster Venus with eyes welcoming the viewer into a sea of tenderness. She also became a major subject of his art. Sadly, she exchanged camera for canvas, becoming his student after all. But it wasn’t long before she let him convince her that photography was a lesser art than painting. She approached Picasso as an artist, asking him to pose for her, which he did. She was politically active, passionate, and already an experienced lover (after her affair with the famously kinky Georges Bataille). When she met Picasso in 1936, she was part of the Surrealist inner circle and had exhibited her dreamlike montage photographs at major exhibitions. The story of Dora Maar’s life I encountered in those books in the library told the maddening tale of a woman of great talent led astray by the cult of (cruel) male genius. I later discovered that she slept next door, but the prospect made me feel as if I owed her something in return for her hospitality. I believed for a while, in fact, that I was sleeping in her room. In my case, Dora became a kind of absent presence for me during the long hours I spent virtually alone in her big, empty house. There is something like haunting that happens to the (would-be) biographer. My hunger for more of Dora followed me around her vast, four-story house during the month I was in residence there as a fellow of the Nancy B. I found two in English that piqued my interest, but as I dug in, I found their portraits of Maar disappointingly partial, suffering, as so many women’s life stories do, from a dearth of primary sources. But increasingly I found Dora’s deep brown eyes calling to me from the books about her in the library, mostly in French. In fact, I went to the Dora Maar House to work on a project about one. The tour moved on, and I put the kettle on the stove. She had to extinguish her own light to reflect his. He was the sun god around which the art world orbited. Gopnick agreed that there should be a biography of Maar in English. I had just come down to make some tea when I stumbled upon the writer Adam Gopnick and a few others getting a tour of the house, located in Menerbes, France. I was lamenting this fact a few months ago in the kitchen of Dora Maar’s house, which Picasso gave her in 1944 as he abandoned her for Gilot. While Gilot’s memoir and a biography based on conversations with her are available in English, there are no books in print about Maar’s life except the authoritative Dora Maar by Victoria Combalia, published in Spanish in 2013. As a result, we know frustratingly little of Maar’s life, at least in the English-speaking world. Gilot tackled the problem head-on by publishing the bestselling Life with Picasso, while Maar turned inward, leaving others to mythologize her. Yet, they both knew they would never escape that designation. In contrast to Gilot’s story, hers is the tragic one of a woman destroyed by a male genius.īoth women were, in fact, extraordinary artists who deserve to be remembered as much more than Picasso’s former mistresses. She was the “weeping woman,” frozen in despair in his portraits of her as well as in life. His previous mistress, Dora Maar, who died in 1997, did not fare as well. She emerged triumphantly from their relationship, in fact, becoming a successful artist in her own right, as the lengthy obituaries of her attest. Francoise Gilot, who died recently, is remembered as the only one of Picasso’s mistresses to leave him.
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