The Lover's Dialogue

NEW EXHIBITION REVEALS THE EXTRAORDINARY CREATIVE ENERGY BETWEEN PICASSO AND HIS PARTNER, DORA MAAR. DR TED GOTT DISCUSSES.

As Anne Baldassari, Director of the Musée Picasso, Paris, renowned Picasso scholar and curator/author for this magnificent Melbourne Winter Masterpieces 2006 exhibition, Picasso: Love & War 1935-1945 noted on the occasion of the show’s inauguration at the Musée Picasso in February, both Pablo Picasso (born 25 October, 1881) and Dora Maar (born 22 November, 1907) shared the Scorpio star sign1. Not surprisingly then, as Anne Baldassari documents in the meticulous research that underpins this unique and uniquely comprehensive exhibition, arachnidan and insect imagery entered the many layers of loaded visual symbols that circumscribed the at times stormy, and always extraordinary relationship played out between Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso in the globally turbulent decade 1935-1945.

Whether or not one believes in astrological kismet, the notion of two romanticallyinvolved artists born at opposite ends of Scorpio’s trajectory conjures up nonetheless the irresistible image of a pair of fatally attracted arachnids circling each other, their intellectual tails erected and bristling with potentially perilous magnetism.2 This is an apt analogy, for Picasso: Love & War 1935-1945 is an exhibition that not only documents one of the most creative and dramatic periods in the life of Picasso, the 20th century’s pre-eminent artistic genius, but also restores the art of Dora Maar to its rightful place at the forefront of avantgarde thought and visual expression in the retrospectively sublime Paris of the Surrealist Revolution.3

While it is indeed true that the Argentinean and French-raised, and Spanish/ French/English-speaking Dora Maar, a photographer and painter who first won Picasso’s heart in late 1935, was a fiery and passionate soul for whom emotional outbursts were apparently quickly ignited, we should equally remember the testimony of Picasso’s subsequent partner Françoise Gilot (for whom he finally left Dora Maar in 1945), that Picasso himself ‘was very moody: one day brilliant sunshine, the next day thunder and lightning’.4 In a most important sense Picasso: Love & War re-legitimises Dora Maar, both privately and intellectually, as a fascinating and strong persona deserving of far greater consideration than her too-frequent stereotyping as Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’ muse.

At the time of their first meeting in the wintry Paris of 1935-36, Picasso was already an artistic phenomenon. Dora Maar herself, however, was by this time a highly accomplished commercial photographer and a visionary Surrealist artist, whose highly disturbing Portrait of Ubu was to be one of the star exhibits in the legendary Exposition surréaliste d’objets (Exhibition of Surrealist Objects) held at Charles Ratton’s progressive Parisian gallery in May 1936.While Françoise Gilot was later to rather scandalously write of Picasso that ‘He was rather fond of saying, “For me, there are only two kinds of women – goddesses and doormats”,’ Dora Maar was far from being the latter.5 As Anne Baldassari notes tellingly, on one postcard sent to Picasso in 1939 she signed herself with bravura authority, ‘Photographer, and bad girl’; and she embarked upon her life with Picasso with eyes wide open, independent, talented and strong-willed. Something of her strong character can be sensed from Picasso's photograph of her from March 1936 (left).

Baldassari’s fascinating researches, drawing upon the rich legacy made to the Musée Picasso with the gift of Dora Maar’s archives in 1997 (documented in both the exhibition and its catalogue by Béatrice Hatala’s poignant photographs of the interior of Maar’s apartment at 6 rue de Savoie as it remained upon her death in the summer of that year), reconstruct Maar’s creativity as a leading photographer within the Surrealist avant-garde. Baldassari examines in detail, for example, Dora Maar’s famous 29 rue d’Astorg, a photomontage of 1936 that took its title from the photographic premises she had established at that address in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. In its many developmental states, she argues, this work operates as a virtual selfportrait and blazon for the importance Dora attached to her commercial independence as a photographer, and for the radical creativity this afforded her at the time she entered into her decade-long relationship with Pablo Picasso.

In Picasso: Love & War Anne Baldassari analyses the creative alchemy that fuelled the initial passion shared by Picasso and Maar in the years 1936-37. Picasso, inspired by Maar’s photographic expertise, experimented with a remarkable series of glass-plate ‘rayographs’ or ‘photo-grams’, striking portraits of Dora that fused photography and printmaking into an entirely new medium. Dora Maar’s own proximity to Picasso was to lead her increasingly back towards painting as a primary means of artistic expression.Thus, in this extraordinary exhibition, we are privy to the newly revealed intimacies of a marvellous dialogue between two highly charged artists at a time of providential romantic connection for each of these exceptionally strong personalities.

As the romance between these two gifted artists unfolded in the closing years of the 1930s, Picasso celebrated his love for Dora Maar in sensuous drawings, prints and paintings that radiate lyrical abandon. He mythologised their relationship in majestic compositions depicting Minotaurs and Sphinxes. And an endlessly vibrant series of painted portraits flowed from Picasso’s hands in homage to Dora’s sultry beauty, such as Portrait of Dora Maar, 1937 (on page 30). Dora Maar, in turn, celebrated the couple’s intimacy in exquisite photographs showing Picasso enacting mythic scenarios during summer sojourns at the seaside. Visitors to this exhibition will be simply transported by the energised and captivatingly joyful ‘sunniness’ that beams forth from these many visual love-poems.

At the same time, though, Picasso and Dora Maar’s decade-long relationship was illfatedly shadowed by the increasing madness and terror of European politics, a maelstrom within which they were inevitably entrapped, from the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 to the conclusion of the Second World War’s awful terribilità in 1945. Picasso: Love & War also explores the genesis of one of the greatest masterpieces of war commentary in the history of art – Picasso’s immortal Guernica (Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid), created amidst the backwash of horror that engulfed the world after the Nazi aerial bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April, 1937. A sober yet utterly mesmerising section of Picasso: Love & War features the remarkable photographic documentation undertaken by Dora Maar in Picasso’s ‘loft’ studio at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins in the 6th arrondissement of Paris in the late spring of 1937, where Picasso obsessively worked and reworked his monumental composition as his rage against this inhuman slaughter engendered daily renewals of Guernica’s immortal protest against the essential blasphemy of all wars. The Dora Maar archives have enabled Anne Baldassari to fully reassess Picasso’s creation of Guernica, revealing photographic records that take our knowledge way beyond the traditionally accepted eight stages of this painting’s development, known from the selection of Maar’s photographs that werepublished in the journal Cahiers d’art in July 1937. In addition to beautifully articulating the seminal importance of Dora Maar’s professional role in this first systematic photographic documentation of an artist at work, adumbrating and then finely calibrating such an iconic masterpiece of modern art, Baldassari also argues a fine case for Picasso’s scrutiny of Maar’s photographic proofs of his daily work-in-progress having in turn strongly affected the starkly monochromatic impact of his ashen chef d’oeuvre.

It was in the wake of Guernica’s creation that Picasso painted, etched and sketched his powerful Weeping Women compositions, among them the National Gallery of Victoria’s celebrated painting Weeping Woman 1937 and the print of the Weeping Woman 1937. While acknowledging Dora Maar’s role as quasi catalyst and model for these works, Picasso: Love & War also explores a parallel motif from this period in Picasso’s art, that of a perhaps self-referential weeping male figure, as well as Dora Maar’s own preoccupations in her Surrealist photomontages with imagery of eyes floating in seas of tears. The familiar and limiting caricature of Dora Maar as Picasso’s favourite histrionic muse is thereby adroitly challenged.

By 1943 the grand passion that had propelled the couple’s tumultuous yet hugely productive relationship was largely spent; a final physical separation between the two occured in 1945. Like everyone who lived through the appalling years of World War Two, the lives of Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar were inexorably affected by the weight of world events. The concluding sections of Picasso: Love & War examine the increasingly difficult position in which Picasso found himself between 1940 and 1944, living as a pro-Republican Spanish ‘alien’ in Nazioccupied Paris. During the enforced introspection of these bleak years he was to produce some of art’s greatest still life and allegorical compositions, both reinvigorating the traditional vanitas imagery of the Old Masters and forging strangely disturbing responses to the unfolding, nightmarish revelations of the shocking facts of the Holocaust.

This brief introduction can in no way encapsulate the variety and depth of the complex moral, intellectual and visual tapestry woven by Anne Baldassari in Picasso: Love & War, an exhibition whose operatic breadth and almost cinematic impact are compellingly enhanced by its cogent and timely retelling and analysis of such complex historical and personal narratives. Picasso: Love & War is a truly groundbreaking and unforgettable exhibition.

Ted Gott Senior Curator, International Art
Article originally published in Gallery magazine

1. Anne Baldassari, Picasso / Dora Maar – Il faisait tellement noir…, Paris, Flammarion / Réunion des musées nationaux, 2006, p. 20.
2. The astrological dates for Scorpio vary between 23/24 October and 21/22 November, according to differing sources.
3. Revolution – against staid artistic conventions, bourgeois morality, and political conservatism – was the catch-cry of the Surrealist movement from its very inception. Shortly after the publication of André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto, the movement’s first journal La Révolution surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution) was founded (1924-1929) under the direction of Pierre Naville and Benjamin Péret. It was followed, between 1930 and 1933, by another journal, Surréalisme au service de la révolution (Surrealism at the Service of the Revolution), directed by André Breton himself.
4. Françoise Gilot & Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso, Thomas Nelson, London, 1965, p. 76.
5. Ibid., p. 77.