Dora Maar was perhaps the only one of Picasso's mistresses he saw as a true artistic partner. A new exhibition in Paris shows why, writes Lara Marlowe
In the autumn of 1935, a beautiful young woman caught Pablo Picasso's eye in the Café de Flore. Dora Maar sat a few tables away, and had probably planned the scene to entrap the famous painter.
"She wore black gloves embroidered with little pink flowers," wrote Francoise Gilot, the younger woman who would later supplant Dora in Picasso's affections. "She had taken off her gloves and took a long pointed knife which she jabbed into the table, between her spread fingers. From time to time, she missed by a fraction of a millimetre and her hand was covered with blood. Picasso was fascinated . . . He asked Dora to give him her gloves, which he kept in a glass case."
That same year, Picasso recalled Dora's bizarre performance in a poem he published in Cahiers d'art: "young girl handsome carpenter who nails boards with the thorns of roses don't cry a tear to see the wood bleed."
Dora Maar was born Henriette Theodora Markovitch. Her father was a Croatian architect, her mother French. She spent her childhood in Buenos Aires and spoke fluent Spanish, which strengthened Picasso's attraction to her. She was 28 when she met the 53-year-old Picasso. The painter had just left his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, for his mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who had just given birth to their daughter, Maya.
Picasso wanted to divorce Olga, but was reluctant to sacrifice half of his property in a settlement. Dora Maar was the antithesis of the sweet, submissive Marie-Thérèse, whom Picasso continued to see throughout his liaison with Dora.
Dora was already a successful fashion and portrait photographer, and an active member of the Surrealist movement. She was far more politicised than Picasso, participating in far left-wing groups Octobre, Masses and Contre-attaque.
Picasso identified with Dora more than any other mistress.
"Picasso is a man and a woman deeply entwined," write the poet, Jean Cocteau. "Like in his paintings. He's a living ménage. The Picasso ménage. Dora is a concubine with whom he is unfaithful to himself. From this ménage marvellous monsters are born."
Anne Baldassari, the new director of Paris's Musée Picasso and the curator of its Dora Maar-Picasso 1935-1945 exhibition, insists that when Picasso painted Dora repeatedly as a weeping woman, he was in fact painting himself, grieving for the barbarity of mankind. This is borne out by a study for Guernica, titled The Pleading Man, on loan from the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. The man wears Picasso's signature striped fisherman's jersey, raises his hands to the sky and, like Dora Maar, sobs.
THE DECADE THROUGH which Picasso and Dora loved each other was the worst in a terrible century; in Picasso's words, an age "of brutality and darkness". The theme is echoed in the subtitle of the exhibition, chosen by Baldassari from a poem which Picasso dedicated to Dora: "It was so dark at noon that one saw the stars."
Baldassari says Picasso saw Dora as "a true artistic and intellectual partner, probably the only woman he ever considered an equal". American photographer Man Ray's images of Dora hang in the first room of the exhibition, opposite a series of portraits of Picasso which Dora shot in her studio in the rue d'Astorg soon after they met.
Dora had the beauty of a film star. Man Ray, like Picasso, was fascinated by her hands. Her habit of polishing her fingernails with red, green or black varnish, and her fondness for flamboyant hats, show in many of Picasso's portraits of her.
Dora never printed her first photographic portraits of Picasso, and Baldassari has chosen to exhibit them as negatives. One has the impression of watching Dora take possession of the painter through the lens of her Rolleiflex. At the beginning of the session, he is reserved, in jacket and tie; by the end, he has abandoned both, and all formality.
As an illustration for a poem by Paul Éluard, Picasso first depicted Dora as a nude female Minotaur with hairy chest and horns - further evidence that he saw her as a sort of alter ego. Picasso often portrayed himself as a Minotaur, with a bull's head on a man's body, or the other way around as a centaur. These mythological creatures represented sexual potency and the brutality of politics. But they were also objects of pity. As Picasso's fascination with bullfighting showed, they were doomed beasts.
Baldassari notes that Picasso's myriad portraits of Dora were anything but an attempt to understand his subject.
"They're the opposite of the psychological profile," she says. "Picasso uses a face to impose a style." He several times painted Dora with the body of a bird.
"She was anything you wanted," Picasso said. "A dog, a mouse, a bird, an idea, a thunderstorm. That's a great advantage when falling in love."
CLOSE TO 300 works are on show in the exhibition, about 60 of which had not been seen since the 1940s. Though it features mostly Picasso and Dora's renditions of each other, we are told little of their actual relationship. That is what makes a small room holding the momentos of Picasso which Dora kept so precious. It shows that geniuses are as silly as the rest of us when they fall in love.
On a blue sheet of paper, Picasso wrote his mistress's name dozens of times; on another scrap he quoted Verlaine ("and here is my heart which beats only for you"). There are tiny pressed bouquets with the brown envelope that held them, marked, in Picasso's writing: "Dora Maar, first day of spring 1937." She kept a brown-stained piece of paper marked "Picasso's blood".
The Spanish Civil War overshadowed the lovers' sentimentality. On April 26th, 1937, the Luftwaffe bombed a Basque village, killing more than 2,000 people. Picasso was enraged by the news.
"He ordered a large canvas and began to paint his version of Guernica," Man Ray recalled. "He worked feverishly, every day, using only black, grey and white: he was too angry to worry about subtleties of colour or problems of harmony and composition."
Not only did Dora Maar inspire the central figure in Guernica, a woman holding an oil lamp, but she also photographed the work in progress - the first time the creation of a masterpiece has been chronicled in this way. Picasso studied her photographs to help him advance through those months of May and June 1937. In July, the painting represented Spain at the World's Fair in Paris.
A perhaps apocryphal anecdote says that during the occupation, a German officer showed up at Picasso's studio in the rue des Grands-Augustins, clutching a photograph of Guernica.
"Did you do this?" the German asked. (Picasso's art was considered "degenerate" by the fascists.)
"No. You did," Picasso replied.
Unfortunately, Spain no longer loans Guernica, considered a national symbol too priceless to travel. But the exhibition includes a series of 18 of Dora's photographs of Guernica in the making, plus several of Picasso at work on the canvas.
The New York Museum of Modern Art has loaned The Mass Grave, painted in a similar monochrome style eight years after Guernica. Picasso said he painted Mass Grave by intuition, before learning of the full horror of the Nazi death camps. Dora said it was inspired by a Spanish film of a family massacred in their kitchen.
In May 1943, Picasso met a tall, slender, 22-year-old painter named Françoise Gilot. By now he was 60 and Dora 35. Dora became, literally, mad with jealousy and spent a brief period in a psychiatric hospital. She would become increasingly reclusive and religious until her death in 1997.
"After Picasso, only God," she once said.
Picasso's affair with Dora drew to a long, agonising close. They ran into each other one day in the Café de Flore and he insisted on bringing Françoise to Dora's studio to see her paintings. He then bullied Dora into reassuring Françoise that it was all over between them.
"Dora Maar looked over at me briefly and witheringly," Gilot wrote. "It was true; there wasno longer anything between Pablo and her, she said, and I certainly shouldn't worry about being the cause of their break-up."
Dora then predicted that Francoise would be "out on the ash-heap before three months had passed". Turning to Picasso, she added: "You've never loved anyone in your life. You don't know how to love."
Dora Maar-Picasso 1935-1945 is at the Musée Picasso, 5, rue de Thorigny, 75003 Paris, until May 22