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Lot Essay
Maya Widmaier-Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Claude Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Executed in 1942, Tête de femme (Dora Maar) is a stunning portrait of a female, immediately recognisable as the Yugoslavian born photographer, painter and poet, with whom Pablo Picasso started, in 1936, an intense love affair that lasted through the War years, and was indelibly tinged with the tragedy of the catastrophic conflict.
Dora’s mysteriously intense but inscrutably impassive visage seemed to reflect the ominous and troubled mood in Europe during the increasingly violent years that preceded the Second World War. However, as John Richardson has pointed out: ‘After World War II broke out, Picasso came to portray Dora more and more frequently as a sacrificial victim, a tearful symbol of his own pain and grief at the horrors of tyranny and war’ (in “Pablo Picasso’s Femme au chapeau de paille”, Christie’s, New York, sale catalogue, 4 May 2004, p. 113).
The Dora Maar portrayed in the present lot is not like the terrified, terrifying Erinyes-like ‘women of war’ typical of Picasso’s celebrated Weeping Women series of 1937; instead, here, she stares outward with a wide-eyed look of resignation. Her distorted face is set against a sombre background and pervaded by a melancholic, sinister aspect typical of the artist’s work of this period, and in line with the sitter’s mood at the time the present lot was executed. In early 1942, reflecting a growing discord between herself and Picasso, Dora Maar wrote in a poem: ‘Today it’s another landscape in this Sunday at the end / of the month of March 1942 in Paris the silence is / so great that the songs of the tame birds are like little / flames you can see. I am desperate / But let it be.’ (Dora Maar quoted in M. M. A. Caws, Dora Maar with & without Picasso, a biography, London, 2000, p. 162). It was in May 1943, shortly after the execution of Tête de femme (Dora Maar), that Picasso met Françoise Gilot, a young painter, in the restaurant Le Catalan in Paris. She soon became (and remained, for ten years) his lover and artistic muse, which left Dora Maar devastated.
Beautifully drawn with cloudy deep brushstrokes, Tête de femme (Dora Maar) was acquired by the father of the present owners over fifty years ago, and has since remained in the same family, never offered at auction before.
Claude Picasso has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Executed in 1942, Tête de femme (Dora Maar) is a stunning portrait of a female, immediately recognisable as the Yugoslavian born photographer, painter and poet, with whom Pablo Picasso started, in 1936, an intense love affair that lasted through the War years, and was indelibly tinged with the tragedy of the catastrophic conflict.
Dora’s mysteriously intense but inscrutably impassive visage seemed to reflect the ominous and troubled mood in Europe during the increasingly violent years that preceded the Second World War. However, as John Richardson has pointed out: ‘After World War II broke out, Picasso came to portray Dora more and more frequently as a sacrificial victim, a tearful symbol of his own pain and grief at the horrors of tyranny and war’ (in “Pablo Picasso’s Femme au chapeau de paille”, Christie’s, New York, sale catalogue, 4 May 2004, p. 113).
The Dora Maar portrayed in the present lot is not like the terrified, terrifying Erinyes-like ‘women of war’ typical of Picasso’s celebrated Weeping Women series of 1937; instead, here, she stares outward with a wide-eyed look of resignation. Her distorted face is set against a sombre background and pervaded by a melancholic, sinister aspect typical of the artist’s work of this period, and in line with the sitter’s mood at the time the present lot was executed. In early 1942, reflecting a growing discord between herself and Picasso, Dora Maar wrote in a poem: ‘Today it’s another landscape in this Sunday at the end / of the month of March 1942 in Paris the silence is / so great that the songs of the tame birds are like little / flames you can see. I am desperate / But let it be.’ (Dora Maar quoted in M. M. A. Caws, Dora Maar with & without Picasso, a biography, London, 2000, p. 162). It was in May 1943, shortly after the execution of Tête de femme (Dora Maar), that Picasso met Françoise Gilot, a young painter, in the restaurant Le Catalan in Paris. She soon became (and remained, for ten years) his lover and artistic muse, which left Dora Maar devastated.
Beautifully drawn with cloudy deep brushstrokes, Tête de femme (Dora Maar) was acquired by the father of the present owners over fifty years ago, and has since remained in the same family, never offered at auction before.