Pablo Picasso

Rosenberg & Helft, London (acquired from the artist)

Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., Pittsburgh and New York (acquired from the above)

Buchholz Gallery (Curt Valentin), New York

G. David Thompson, Pittsburgh (sold: Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, March 23 & 24, 1966, lot 69)

Acquired at the above sale

New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Picasso, Forty Years of his Art, 1939, no. 359

New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1942 (on loan)

The Picasso Project, Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, The Spanish Civil War, San Francisco, 1997, no. 39-065 (a), illustrated p. 234

Picasso completed this striking portrait of Dora Maar in a red dress when the European continent was on the brink of war in 1939.  With images of the Spanish Civil war still fresh in his memory,  the subject of a nation at peril seemed too overwhelming for him to face yet again.  Instead, he turned his attention to his immediate environment, painting still-lifes constructed from the contents of his studio and many abstracted portraits of Dora Maar.  Maar had been a constant companion in his studio during these years, acting as a documentary photographer throughout his production of Guernica in 1937.  By 1939, Picasso's paintings of her reflected the trials and tribulations that they had experienced together, and her image came to represent the ominous mood of the era.    

Dora Maar's relationship with Picasso is one of the most tumultuous love stories in the history of 20th century art.   Picasso met Maar, the Surrealist photographer, in the autumn of 1935 and became enchanted by the young woman’s powerful sense of self and commanding presence.  In the eight years that followed, Maar was Picasso’s principal model and the subject of some of his most iconic portraits.   For nearly a decade their partnership was one of intellectual exchange and intense passion, and Maar’s influence on Picasso over these years resulted in some of his most daring portraits of his near-century long career.

Picasso's many portraits of Maar, including the present painting, were highly stylized but did not entirely eliminate her identifiable features (see figs. 1 & 2).  Her flaring nostrils and dark eyes betray her fiery personality, yet the grotesquery of her bifurcated face evidences the great liberties the artist took in tearing apart her image.   In the years that followed the completion of this picture, Picasso's relationship with Maar would become increasingly strained.  Maar's strong-willed personality and her penchant for the dramatic, which had initially amused the artist, grew to infuriate him.  By the early 1940s their relationship had deteriorated drastically, and Picasso's remorseless dismissal of her sent Maar headlong into a complete psychological breakdown. 

Picasso's war-time depictions of Dora Maar are among the most famous of his oeuvre and have come to symbolize the collective emotions of that era. Shockingly abstract yet undeniably alluring, these pictures have a certain tragic beauty and power of presence that few other portraits in Picasso's vast repertoire were able to achieve. 

Fig. 4, Dora Maar, Paris, 1935.  Photograph by Man Ray.

Fig. 3, Photograph of Picasso by Dora Maar, studio at 29  rue d’Astorg, Paris [winter 1935-36]

Fig. 1, Pablo Picasso, Portrait de femme, Paris, 1938, oil on canvas, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris

Fig. 2, Pablo Picasso, Tête de femme, 1940, oil on paper, Musée Picasso, Paris

Fig. 5, Picasso looking over his portrait of Dora Maar in 1939.  Photograph by Brassai