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Lot Essay
From within the hierarchy of Pablo Picasso’s muses, none conjure more substantive acclaim and recognition than the dueling images of Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar from the late 1930s. Etudes (Dora Maar, Marie-Thérèse Walter) offers a striking glimpse into the artist’s psyche as he oscillated between these explosive visions of his two lovers, revealing the quiet and rarified moments of metamorphosis within the murky waters of his affections.
By the time of the present work’s execution in June of 1938, Picasso’s gaze had turned from the ebullient and otherworldly Marie-Thérèse to the intense and cerebral Dora. Following the birth of Marie-Thérèse and Picasso’s daughter Maya, in either late 1935 or early 1936, the artist would be introduced to Maar through surrealist circles in St. Germain-des-Près. Reports of their encounter are mythic: Maar purportedly drew blood as she rapidly drove a penknife between her gloved fingers; Picasso would request to keep the gloves themselves, a sign of his instantaneous captivation. The pair’s relationship would grow during Picasso’s execution of Guernica in 1937 as Maar documented Picasso’s process and cultivated his awareness of political concerns, even securing the room in which he would create the sprawling masterpiece.
In the present drawing, the hatched and subdivided visage of Maar dwarfs the organic forms of the seated Marie-Thérèse. A border circumscribes the former image as it occupies pride of place on the sheet. Where Picasso’s depictions of Marie-Thérèse captured a serene sensuality and a keen biomorphism, those of Maar veered towards the psychological and angular, her dark features emerging from an intricate lattice-like proliferation of fine ink lines. From Maar’s dark almond eye, a singular tear seems to pool, the paradigm of Picasso’s emotive visions of her. As he would later recount, "for me she's the weeping woman. For years I've painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure, either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me" (quoted in F. Gilot, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 122). If Marie-Thérèse was the sun, warm and luminous, Maar was her lunar counterpart, the two caught in a perennial battle for the artist’s fickle affections.
Slowly, over the mid-1930s, Marie-Thérèse would appear less in Picasso’s works, as Maar’s presence came to the fore. And yet, in spite of their polarity, their disparate likenesses began to merge and morph into one across many of Picasso’s canvases from the period, drawn towards one another in his mind with a magnetic attraction of opposite pull. Here too do attributes of the two women coalesce within both vignettes, the sum of their varied parts forming a whole.
Rendered on a single sheet, yet charged with emotional bifurcation, Etudes (Dora Maar, Marie-Thérèse Walter) is less a double portrait than a love triangle emulsified in strokes of India ink, where affection, rivalry, and memory lay just beneath the surface of the sheet. This work, then, endures not merely as a study in contrasting and complementary muses, but as a window into the psychic crossroads of Picasso’s affections and aesthetic development.
By the time of the present work’s execution in June of 1938, Picasso’s gaze had turned from the ebullient and otherworldly Marie-Thérèse to the intense and cerebral Dora. Following the birth of Marie-Thérèse and Picasso’s daughter Maya, in either late 1935 or early 1936, the artist would be introduced to Maar through surrealist circles in St. Germain-des-Près. Reports of their encounter are mythic: Maar purportedly drew blood as she rapidly drove a penknife between her gloved fingers; Picasso would request to keep the gloves themselves, a sign of his instantaneous captivation. The pair’s relationship would grow during Picasso’s execution of Guernica in 1937 as Maar documented Picasso’s process and cultivated his awareness of political concerns, even securing the room in which he would create the sprawling masterpiece.
In the present drawing, the hatched and subdivided visage of Maar dwarfs the organic forms of the seated Marie-Thérèse. A border circumscribes the former image as it occupies pride of place on the sheet. Where Picasso’s depictions of Marie-Thérèse captured a serene sensuality and a keen biomorphism, those of Maar veered towards the psychological and angular, her dark features emerging from an intricate lattice-like proliferation of fine ink lines. From Maar’s dark almond eye, a singular tear seems to pool, the paradigm of Picasso’s emotive visions of her. As he would later recount, "for me she's the weeping woman. For years I've painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure, either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me" (quoted in F. Gilot, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 122). If Marie-Thérèse was the sun, warm and luminous, Maar was her lunar counterpart, the two caught in a perennial battle for the artist’s fickle affections.
Slowly, over the mid-1930s, Marie-Thérèse would appear less in Picasso’s works, as Maar’s presence came to the fore. And yet, in spite of their polarity, their disparate likenesses began to merge and morph into one across many of Picasso’s canvases from the period, drawn towards one another in his mind with a magnetic attraction of opposite pull. Here too do attributes of the two women coalesce within both vignettes, the sum of their varied parts forming a whole.
Rendered on a single sheet, yet charged with emotional bifurcation, Etudes (Dora Maar, Marie-Thérèse Walter) is less a double portrait than a love triangle emulsified in strokes of India ink, where affection, rivalry, and memory lay just beneath the surface of the sheet. This work, then, endures not merely as a study in contrasting and complementary muses, but as a window into the psychic crossroads of Picasso’s affections and aesthetic development.