Lot Essay
The works which Picasso created during the early years of World War II are dominated by the image of his mistress, Dora Maar. Of the twenty-two oils listed in Zervos which he executed in the first eight months of 1940, all but four are portraits of Dora, the present picture among them; innumerable drawings and sketches of Dora from this period bear further witness to her mounting importance within Picasso's art. With their fantastically original distortions and their disquieting sense of gothic, almost monstrous, vitality, the portraits of Dora are a masterful record both of Picasso's tempestuous relationship with his mistress and of the anxiety which pervaded wartime France. Perhaps more importantly, they represent a critical step in Picasso's ceaseless exploration of the artistic possibilities of the human figure and as such are an essential chapter in the history of twentieth-century portraiture; as Brigitte Lal wrote in the catalogue to the 1996 exhibition of Picasso's portraits at The Museum of Modern Art:
Their terribilit no doubt explains why the innumerable, very different portraits that Picasso did of [Dora] remain among the finest achievements of his art, at a time when he was engaged in a sort of third path, verging on Surrealist representation while rejecting strict representation and, naturally, abstraction. Today, more than ever, the fascination that the image of this admirable, but suffering and alienated, face exerts on us incontestably ensues from its coinciding with our modern consciousness of the body in its threefold dimension of precariousness, ambiguity, and monstrosity. There is no doubt that by signing these portraits, Picasso tolled the final bell for the reign of ideal beauty and opened the way for the aesthetic tyranny of a sort of terrible and tragic beauty, the fruit of our contemporary history. (B. Lal, "'For Charming Dora': Portraits of Dora Maar," in exh. cat., Picasso and Portraiture, New York, 1996, p. 385)
Dora Maar was born in Tour in 1909, the daughter of a Yugoslavian architect; she spent most of her youth in Argentina before returning to France in the late 1920s. As a young photographer in the early 1930s, she shared a studio with Brassa and lived with Georges Bataille and the cinematographer Louis Chavance. She was an intimate of the Surrealist movement and it was through Paul Eluard that she first met Picasso in 1936. A woman of extraordinary intelligence and striking beauty (fig. 1), Dora was a continual source of inspiration to Picasso throughout their relationship. As Franoise Gilot, one of Picasso's later lovers, reported, Dora Maar "had a beautiful oval face but a heavy jaw, which is a characteristic trait of almost all the portraits Picasso made of her. Her hair was black and pulled back in a severe, starkly dramatic coiffure. I noticed her intense bronze-green eyes, and her slender hands with their long, tapering fingers" (F. Gilot, Life with Picasso, London, 1965, p. 14). Other friends of the painter recalled, "Her vigorously sculptured, expressive head with its characteristically asymmetric face, attracted him both as a painter and as a man" (W. Boeck and J. Sabarts, Picasso, London, 1961, p. 243). And Roland Penrose has commented, "Since Picasso began to draw portraits of Dora Maar when he was staying at Mougins in 1936, her face became more and more an obsession" (R. Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, London, 1958, pp. 303-304).
Although the paintings which Picasso made during the war years only rarely have overt political content, they bear the unmistakable stamp of the wartime ambiance. As Picasso once explained, "I have not painted the war because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict. But I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings I have done" (quoted in M. Goggin, Picasso and his Art during the German Occupation: 1940-1944, Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1985, p. 395). This is perhaps clearest in the strident emotional quality of the portraits of Dora Maar, with their dramatic distortions and bold re-arrangements of the human form. The present picture, for example, is notable for the way in which the face of Dora is split in two: the right half a frontal view of a woman with a vulnerable, tear-filled eye and a full, sensuous mouth, the left half a profile image consisting of a frantic, dilated eye and an elongated nose with flaring nostrils comparable to the snout of a dog. (Indeed, critics have suggested that Picasso explicitly based his rendering of Dora's nose upon the snout of his Afghan hound Kasbec, whom he also depicted in a roughly contemporaneous drawing [fig. 2].) The result is a picture which fundamentally disrupts the unity of the human subject--according to Lal, "a vision of the world, the sign of universal catastrophe" (B. Lal, op. cit., p. 396). As Penrose has written:
For Picasso, the subject...has become the victim of his will to destroy appearances. Vision rather than subject-matter becomes supreme. The Cubists had all destroyed the form of objects such as guitars, bottles and even the human body when reorganizing their shapes in still-lifes or figure compositions, but none had had the same courage as Picasso to demolish the human head. (R. Penrose, op. cit., p. 304)
Similar distortions to those in the present painting are manifest in two of the Picasso's most extraordinary portraits of Dora, Femme se coiffant, also from 1940 (fig. 3), and the Basel Kunstmuseum's Femme au chapeau assise dans un fauteuil, executed the following year (fig. 4).
Picasso spent much of the first year of the war in Royan, near Bordeaux, returning to his Parisian studio only from mid-March to mid-May of 1940; the present picture was painted during this visit to the capital, just five days before Picasso's last exhibition until the cease-fire (at the gallery of Yvonne Zervos, wife of Christian Zervos). It is the most imaginative and fully worked of a series of four portraits of Dora which Picasso executed in Paris between April 10 and April 21, 1940. All four show Dora from the bust up, and in the background of the present example, we can discern the stylized outline of a blue armchair in which Dora is seated. Although Picasso had made several paintings early in his career portraying a lover in an armchair --the celebrated Cubist manifesto depicting Eva Gouel, Femme assise dans un fauteuil, 1913 (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 364; Private Collection, ex-Collection of Victor and Sally Ganz), for example, or the well-known Neo-Classical portrait of Olga Kokhlova from 1917 in the Muse Picasso (Zervos, vol. 3, no. 83)--it was only with his portraits of Marie-Thrse Walter in the 1930s that this became a major theme in his oeuvre.
(fig. 1) Dora Maar, 1936
(Photo by Man Ray)
(fig. 2) Pablo Picasso, Kasbec, 1940
Location unknown
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Femme se coiffant, 1940
Private collection
(fig. 4) Pablo Picasso, Femme au chapeau assise dans un fauteuil, 1941
ffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Kunstmuseum
Their terribilit no doubt explains why the innumerable, very different portraits that Picasso did of [Dora] remain among the finest achievements of his art, at a time when he was engaged in a sort of third path, verging on Surrealist representation while rejecting strict representation and, naturally, abstraction. Today, more than ever, the fascination that the image of this admirable, but suffering and alienated, face exerts on us incontestably ensues from its coinciding with our modern consciousness of the body in its threefold dimension of precariousness, ambiguity, and monstrosity. There is no doubt that by signing these portraits, Picasso tolled the final bell for the reign of ideal beauty and opened the way for the aesthetic tyranny of a sort of terrible and tragic beauty, the fruit of our contemporary history. (B. Lal, "'For Charming Dora': Portraits of Dora Maar," in exh. cat., Picasso and Portraiture, New York, 1996, p. 385)
Dora Maar was born in Tour in 1909, the daughter of a Yugoslavian architect; she spent most of her youth in Argentina before returning to France in the late 1920s. As a young photographer in the early 1930s, she shared a studio with Brassa and lived with Georges Bataille and the cinematographer Louis Chavance. She was an intimate of the Surrealist movement and it was through Paul Eluard that she first met Picasso in 1936. A woman of extraordinary intelligence and striking beauty (fig. 1), Dora was a continual source of inspiration to Picasso throughout their relationship. As Franoise Gilot, one of Picasso's later lovers, reported, Dora Maar "had a beautiful oval face but a heavy jaw, which is a characteristic trait of almost all the portraits Picasso made of her. Her hair was black and pulled back in a severe, starkly dramatic coiffure. I noticed her intense bronze-green eyes, and her slender hands with their long, tapering fingers" (F. Gilot, Life with Picasso, London, 1965, p. 14). Other friends of the painter recalled, "Her vigorously sculptured, expressive head with its characteristically asymmetric face, attracted him both as a painter and as a man" (W. Boeck and J. Sabarts, Picasso, London, 1961, p. 243). And Roland Penrose has commented, "Since Picasso began to draw portraits of Dora Maar when he was staying at Mougins in 1936, her face became more and more an obsession" (R. Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, London, 1958, pp. 303-304).
Although the paintings which Picasso made during the war years only rarely have overt political content, they bear the unmistakable stamp of the wartime ambiance. As Picasso once explained, "I have not painted the war because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict. But I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings I have done" (quoted in M. Goggin, Picasso and his Art during the German Occupation: 1940-1944, Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1985, p. 395). This is perhaps clearest in the strident emotional quality of the portraits of Dora Maar, with their dramatic distortions and bold re-arrangements of the human form. The present picture, for example, is notable for the way in which the face of Dora is split in two: the right half a frontal view of a woman with a vulnerable, tear-filled eye and a full, sensuous mouth, the left half a profile image consisting of a frantic, dilated eye and an elongated nose with flaring nostrils comparable to the snout of a dog. (Indeed, critics have suggested that Picasso explicitly based his rendering of Dora's nose upon the snout of his Afghan hound Kasbec, whom he also depicted in a roughly contemporaneous drawing [fig. 2].) The result is a picture which fundamentally disrupts the unity of the human subject--according to Lal, "a vision of the world, the sign of universal catastrophe" (B. Lal, op. cit., p. 396). As Penrose has written:
For Picasso, the subject...has become the victim of his will to destroy appearances. Vision rather than subject-matter becomes supreme. The Cubists had all destroyed the form of objects such as guitars, bottles and even the human body when reorganizing their shapes in still-lifes or figure compositions, but none had had the same courage as Picasso to demolish the human head. (R. Penrose, op. cit., p. 304)
Similar distortions to those in the present painting are manifest in two of the Picasso's most extraordinary portraits of Dora, Femme se coiffant, also from 1940 (fig. 3), and the Basel Kunstmuseum's Femme au chapeau assise dans un fauteuil, executed the following year (fig. 4).
Picasso spent much of the first year of the war in Royan, near Bordeaux, returning to his Parisian studio only from mid-March to mid-May of 1940; the present picture was painted during this visit to the capital, just five days before Picasso's last exhibition until the cease-fire (at the gallery of Yvonne Zervos, wife of Christian Zervos). It is the most imaginative and fully worked of a series of four portraits of Dora which Picasso executed in Paris between April 10 and April 21, 1940. All four show Dora from the bust up, and in the background of the present example, we can discern the stylized outline of a blue armchair in which Dora is seated. Although Picasso had made several paintings early in his career portraying a lover in an armchair --the celebrated Cubist manifesto depicting Eva Gouel, Femme assise dans un fauteuil, 1913 (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 364; Private Collection, ex-Collection of Victor and Sally Ganz), for example, or the well-known Neo-Classical portrait of Olga Kokhlova from 1917 in the Muse Picasso (Zervos, vol. 3, no. 83)--it was only with his portraits of Marie-Thrse Walter in the 1930s that this became a major theme in his oeuvre.
(fig. 1) Dora Maar, 1936
(Photo by Man Ray)
(fig. 2) Pablo Picasso, Kasbec, 1940
Location unknown
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Femme se coiffant, 1940
Private collection
(fig. 4) Pablo Picasso, Femme au chapeau assise dans un fauteuil, 1941
ffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Kunstmuseum