Portrait of Picasso’s mistress of PAIN
It’s a painting that casts a searing light on the great artist’s bizarre ménage à quatre. As it goes on show in London, the erotically charged truth behind this...
SELDOM can a selfportrait have captured a moment of such searing intensity, sexual jealousy and emotional turmoil. Called The Conversation, it depicts two women sitting at a table, one with her back to the viewer, the other staring mournfully into the middle distance. What could their conversation be about? And why such unease between them?
The answer lies with the figure who is absent from the picture but whose shadow looms over it. For this is a painting by Dora Maar, long-time muse and mistress of Pablo Picasso, which takes centre stage at a stunning new exhibition at London’s Tate Modern gallery.
It seeks to restore her reputation as an accomplished artist and photographer in her own right.
Only twice before has it been lent out from a Picasso family collection to be exhibited, and never in this country.
It shines a compelling new light on the relationship that defined so much of Dora’s life: her affair with Picasso.
For many years it saw her entangled in a ménage à trois with another of his lovers, Marie-Therese Walter — the other woman in the painting, with whom she was so competitive that they once wrestled for his affections on his studio floor.
This sexual maelstrom was muddled even further by a third mistress, 21-yearold Francoise Gilot, who later joined the harem. As if that wasn’t enough, Picasso was all the while married to first wife, Olga Stepanovna Khokhlova, mother of his son, Paulo.
The torment this caused to Dora was both his twisted pleasure and his inspiration. Again and again, Dora’s distinctive, dark, angular features figure in Picasso’s pictures: her eyes, nose and mouth rearranged in his traditional style. She was also often depicted by Picasso in tears — no great surprise, given he was not only unfaithful but also beat her.
It drove Dora to a nervous breakdown so serious that it had to be treated with electric shock therapy. Once she broke up with Picasso in her late 30s, she became a virtual recluse until her death, aged 89, in 1997.
It was a tragic end to a life that had begun so promisingly.
DORA was born in Paris in 1907 as Henriette Theodora Markovitch. She was a star pupil at Paris’s School of Photography and knew the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson at Paris art school, the École des Beaux-Arts.
Dora went from Barcelona to London to America, taking photographs and creating surrealist images that appear in the Tate Modern show. Then, in 1935, she met Picasso, 26 years her senior.
Even during her first meeting, in Paris’s famous Café Les Deux Magots, you could see the shadow of the macabre fate that awaited her. In his description of that encounter, writer Jean-Paul Crespelle recalls Dora ‘driving a small, pointed penknife between her fingers into the wood of the table. Sometimes she missed and a drop of blood appeared between the roses embroidered on her black gloves . . . Picasso would ask Dora to give him the gloves and would lock them up in the showcase he kept for his mementos’.
And so, in 1936, the doomed, brutal affair between the two began. Dora worked alongside Picasso: among her photographs were pictures that documented his anti-war work, Guernica.
But she had to share him with Marie-Therese Walter, who had given birth to his daughter, Maya, a year earlier. While Picasso had no guilt about the situation, the women felt differently. One day they clashed in his studio.
Marie-Therese asked him: ‘Make up your mind. Which one of us goes?’ Picasso later said: ‘I told them they’ll have to fight it out themselves.’ The mistresses wrestled on the floor. Neither won exclusive access to his bed.
In 1942, Marie-Therese confronted
Picasso in his Paris studio about his failure to dissolve his marriage to Olga.
At this point, Dora stormed in, crying at Picasso: ‘But, after all, you love me. You do love me!’
Marie-Therese told Dora to leave, shaking her by the shoulders. Dora responded by slapping her. Marie-Therese pushed Dora out of the studio.
Dora couldn’t have helped noticing, too, that, while Picasso painted her — 60 times — weeping and tortured, Marie-Therese was given the sunny treatment, looking blonde and chirpy, with her full, rounded breasts to the fore.
In one famous 1937 picture of Dora, The Weeping Woman, she’s shown in floods of tears.
Cruelly, Picasso said of Dora: ‘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. It was the deep reality, not the superficial one.’
On another occasion, he brutally added: ‘Dora, for me, was always a weeping woman... And it’s important, because women are suffering machines.’ And the unfortunate Dora didn’t just have to deal with Marie-Therese and her baby daughter.
Although Picasso was separated from his wife Olga, she and their son, Paulo Picasso, 18, were still on the scene. And then, in 1943, along came another mistress, Francoise Gilot. She was another artist, but only 21 — nearly 15 years Dora’s junior. The older woman nicknamed her ‘the schoolgirl’.
GILOT spent a decade with Picasso, bearing him two children, Claude and Paloma. Dora’s misery was deepened by Picasso’s devotion to his new mistress. He once said: ‘Every time I change wives, I should burn the last one.’ Another time he pronounced: ‘Living with someone young helps me to stay young.’
For Dora, the agony of Picasso’s cruelty was only partly relieved by the house he bought her in Vaucluse in South-Eastern France. Following their split in 1945 she remained mentally and emotionally scarred by her involvement with the artist for the rest of her life, a condition that was treated with electroconvulsive therapy and regular visits to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
Despite her appalling treatment at Picasso’s hands, she made her Paris flat into a shrine to the old brute.
Dora became reclusive but she did turn her pain into artistic achievement. Picasso had always encouraged her to paint rather than take photographs, which he thought a lesser art form. But it was only on splitting up with him that her painting came into its own, as she poured her sadness into her dark, inspired art.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, brighter colours crept into her abstract works, and in the 1980s she began to capture the wild romance of the landscape and cloudscape around her Vaucluse house.
All this was done in virtual seclusion. In 1998, a year after her death, her collection was sold in a series of Paris auctions. It included a treasure trove of Picasso material, including ten of his paintings.
And it was only after her death, too, that her later works were seen and admired by the world.
Picasso, who died in 1973 aged 91, remains an artistic superstar. But, as the Tate Modern exhibition shows, the reputation of his cruelly treated mistress has never been so high.
■ DORA MAAR is at the Tate Modern until March 15. Tickets: tate.org.uk