The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
My appointment with Picasso’s muse
An old address book from eBay set Brigitte Benkemoun on a mission to find its owner – and led her to a surreal discovery
It arrived in the post, carefully packed in bubble wrap. Same trademark, same size, same smooth leather, but redder, softer, with a wellused sheen.
He’ll like this, I thought, maybe even better.
My husband had just lost a small Hermès diary, newer than this one, but somehow ageless from constantly sliding in and out of pockets. Engraved with his initials, T D, it was a kind of talisman to which he’d been attached, practically, physically, sensually.
As always when he loses something, which happens regularly, I had to help him look. But this time the diary could not be found. After several days, TD resigned himself to buying a replacement.
“Sadly, that kind of leather isn’t made anymore,” the sales clerk answered, vaguely apologetic, politely definitive. But TD never gives up. His lucky find showed up on eBay under “small vintage leather goods”. Seventy euros. And a few days later it arrived.
Obsessive behaviour is a contagious disease; in his absence I wanted to verify that the found object really was an exact replica of the lost one. I inspected it from every angle. Then I opened it.
The seller had removed the diary refill where the former owner must have noted appointments, or secrets. But a small index for telephone numbers remained, slipped into the inner pocket. Without thinking, I began to leaf through it. I must have been a bit distracted because it took me three pages before a name caught my eye: Cocteau! Yes, Jean Cocteau: 36, rue Montpensier. I remember a shiver running down my spine, then the breathtaking discovery of Chagall: 22, place Dauphine. I flipped wildly through the pages: Giacometti, Lacan… Here was the whole line-up: Aragon, Breton, Brassaï, Braque, Balthus, Éluard, Fini, Leiris, Ponge, Poulenc, Signac, Staël, Sarraute, Tzara – 20 pages I had to read over and over to believe. Twenty astounding pages, like a personal telephone directory for Surrealism and modern art. Twenty pages that I touched softly, hardly breathing, afraid they might self-destruct or fade like a dream. And at the very back, to date the treasure, a 1952 calendar, proving that it had been purchased in 1951.
Now, of course, I wanted to know who had written these names in brown ink. Who could have rubbed elbows with these 20th-century geniuses?
I was hooked before I even knew who was hiding behind this handwriting. Intrigued by these friends, knowing nothing of the life, I was chasing a ghost. I didn’t know the ghost’s name, but the pages were like a small keyhole through which I could peer at a world long vanished, like no other.
The first entry is illegible because it is partly blotted out with black ink. The second might be Andrade, then Ayala. On the fourth line is the first familiar name: Aragon. Followed by a few that call up nothing for me: Achille de Ménerbes, Bernier, Baglum… Then a few entries for whom he or she listed an address as well, perhaps because they were closer friends: Breton, 44, rue Fontaine; Brassaï, 81, rue SaintJacques; Balthus, château de Chassy, Blismes, Nièvre.
The gaze behaves like a paparazzo, snubbing the lesserknowns to focus only on the VIPs: Éluard, Giacometti, Poulenc, Nicolas de Staël… But most of the names in the address book were easy to identify on the internet: Lise Deharme, novelist and muse for the Surrealists; Luis Fernández, painter and friend of Picasso; Douglas Cooper, major art collector and historian; Roland Penrose, English surrealist.
Implicitly, the book’s ownership was being revealed through these relationships. This was someone who kept company with the greatest poets of the time, many of them, though not exclusively, surrealists. Someone who moved even more frequently among painters. Some gallery owners, a canvas restorer. This was probably a painter’s address book.
A tormented, “hysterical,” or melancholic painter. But not a bohemian: he or she recorded contact information for a plumber, private hospital, veterinarian, and hairdresser. I was certain the book belonged to a woman, one associated with the greatest of the great.
If one wanted to quibble, four or five of the century’s giants were missing here: Picasso, Matisse,
Dalí, Miró, René Char. But more important than those missing was the missing owner: the woman who held the pen. Sometimes she made spelling mistakes or got names wrong: she wrote Rochechaure instead of Rochechouart, Leiris with a y, and Alice Toklace rather than Toklas. She was a foreigner, or dyslexic.
At first, she made an effort. Each page begins with a list of carefully written names – always using the same pen – undoubtedly copied from an earlier address book. The letters are even, somewhat rounded, the stroke energetic but neat. And then, after a few lines, the handwriting becomes confused and disorderly. These were the new contacts for the year 1951 whose numbers she added later, scribbling them down, one hand holding the phone, the other reaching for the closest pencil. Or maybe that day she was tired, or in a hurry.
At a used-book stall, I discovered an enormous 1952 phone directory. With this new resource, I crosschecked the names and addresses in the address book. Jacques Lacan’s number did correspond to the one in the book: Lacan, physician, 30, rue de Lille, LIT
Names caught my eye: Braque, Chagall, Fini, Giacometti. A shiver ran down my spine
book to Google. From Google to Wikipedia. Each tiny discovery seemed like a victory.
But some names remained elusive. Camille? Katell? Paulette? Lorraine? Madeleine? Women’s first names, jotted down to be read only by the one who wrote them and knew them so well that the surnames were superfluous.
Achille de Ménerbes also remained a mystery. She had noted his address, 22, rue Petite Fusterie, in Avignon, and his telephone number, 2258. But 70 years later, it was as if this man never existed. Why linger over this name? If I were sensible, I would move on to the next one. Nevertheless, this Achille was like a plaster stuck to my fingers – good thing it wouldn’t let go! Suddenly, under the magnifying glass, the letters fell into place. I had been reading too quickly or not carefully enough. She hadn’t written “Achille de” at all, but “Architecte”!
She must have owned a house in the village of Ménerbes in the Luberon. My fingers trembled as they punched out the letters on my computer keyboard. The Wikipedia page on Ménerbes revealed that only two painters spent time there in the early 1950s. I eliminated Nicolas de Staël, since he appeared among the contacts. The second name was a woman: painter, photographer, driving force behind the surrealists, close friend of Éluard and
Balthus, analysed by Lacan. Everything fit. It was the address book of Dora Maar that I held in my hand.
Dora Maar. I surfed, I clicked, I did not read so much as devour: “Dora Maar, French photographer and painter, Picasso’s mistress…” “Dora Maar, from her given name Henriette Theodora Markovitch, born November 22, 1907, in Paris…” “Only daughter of a Croatian architect and Touranian mother…” “Spent her childhood in Argentina before returning to live in France…” “Friend of André Breton and the surrealists…”
Dates, cities, names. And always the references to Picasso: he “loved other women more passionately, but none had so much influence over him…” “Picasso pushed her to give up photography…” “Picasso left her for the younger Françoise Gilot…” And then, the paintings he did of her, depicting her as “the weeping woman,” disfigured, devastated by grief.
Snippets from a life, flashes of suffering: institutionalised, electric shock treatment, psychoanalysis, God, solitude. So the woman who owned this address book had been Picasso’s companion for almost 10 years, from 1936 to 1945. Before him, she had been a great photographer. After him, a painter who sank into madness, then mysticism, and finally reclusion. Most of the articles about her dated from her death in 1997 and the sale by auction of her estate: €213 million divided up among experts, auctioneers, genealogists, the state, and two distant heirs in France and Croatia who had never met her.
In the end, I wrote down this sentence, copied and pasted so often on the internet I don’t know how to credit it: “She was Pablo Picasso’s mistress and muse, a role that eclipsed the entirety of her work.” A cruel legacy that casts an entire life’s art in the shadow of a giant. Cruel but irrevocable. Her most famous photographs are the portraits of Picasso. But the most astonishing ones come earlier: dreamlike experiments, Surrealist collages, shots capturing social issues. Before she had even met the Spanish painter, she was more famous than her friends Brassaï and Cartier-Bresson, and she had not yet turned 30. Even today, collectors and major museums fight over her prints at auctions. But that is not the case with her paintings, to which she attached much greater importance.
Maar must have started entering names in the address book in January 1951. In Paris, an icy wind was blowing from the north. It snowed for New Year’s Eve. On rue de Savoie, where she lived at number 6, it must have been very cold, especially since she had a tendency to scrimp on coal. From the leather writing case on her mahogany desk, she took one of the quill pens that Picasso had given her. Nothing had been moved in six years. She still slept in the bed where they had made love and still lived among his gifts, his paintings, his sculptures, his little makeshift constructions that she stashed in drawers.
I imagined her carefully filling the small booklet page by page, using this occasion to make a selection; the friends who betrayed her no longer warranted an entry. Sometimes she kept them as one keeps a memento. The hardest to eliminate were the deceased. By deleting their names, she buried them one more time.
This address book was a snapshot of her world in 1951. But who really mattered? Who telephoned her? What numbers did she dial? If someone found our smartphone contacts today, wouldn’t they see our favourites, reconstruct the history of our calls, read our texts and emails, listen to our messages? They would know our entire lives.
This book of hers was silent as the grave. Nevertheless, it could speak of the delicate hands, fingernails forever polished, that slipped it into or retrieved it from her handbag. It could name her true friends. It could remember conversations, confidences, arguments, laughter, or tears, for which it was the only witness. It could also recall her moments of solitude, when it sat there closed.
The living room at the rue de Savoie had become Maar’s studio. She shut herself away there for entire days at a time, or even longer. “I must dwell apart in the desert,” she told a friend. “I want to create an aura of mystery about my work. People must long to see it. I’m still too famous as Picasso’s mistress to be accepted as a painter.” She understood that she would have to reinvent herself, erase “the weeping woman,” and write another story.
But she also had to retreat when she couldn’t bear either herself or what she was painting, when she refused to be seen as less than beautiful, her face drawn, her eyes puffy. She was so proud.
In the past, Picasso had always called when he decided to have lunch at the Catalan, a Spanish restaurant halfway between their two homes. He would say, “I’m leaving, come down.” At his signal, Dora the arrogant, Dora the proud, would grab her bag, tear down her two flights of stairs, and meet him at the street corner. Often she waited. He never did, of course, but would save her a place at the table.
In 1951 she was still going to the Catalan, but no one summoned her to dessscendrre in that tone of his. She wouldn’t have stood for it any more. Six years after their break-up, she must not have copied Picasso’s address or phone number into her new book – one more attempt to erase him further. “After Picasso,” as she said, “there can only be God.”
Finding Dora Maar by Brigitte Benkemoun (tr Jody Gladding) is published by Getty at £18.99
The address book was a snapshot of her world in 1951. It could name her true friends