_PNG.png){kind=small}
Meet Dora Maar, the Muse Behind Pablo Picasso’s ‘The Weeping Woman’
- TERAVARNA
- 17 hours ago
- 5 min read
“For too many centuries women have been muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse; I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue—that I had to do the job myself.” - Anaïs Nin, Author
Pablo Picasso is known for numerous revolutionary contributions, but most of all for his huge influence on modern art. In the 91 years of his life, he presented the world with some of the most iconic and enduring paintings in history—from ‘The Old Guitarist’ to ‘The Weeping Woman’ series of paintings.
For years, ‘The Weeping Woman’ paintings have been a symbol of grief and political anguish, but many still do not know that the face behind their anguished beauty was renowned surrealist photographer Dora Maar.
Did you know that Maar abandoned her photography career to learn painting from Picasso?
Did you know that Maar was 26 years younger than Picasso?
Many such other little-known facts about Maar and her relationship with Picasso will not just change your perception of the Spanish artist but also make you wonder how many times female artists and feminist art were reduced to merely muses and mistresses of their male counterparts.
Dora Maar Was a Talented Photographer
Dora Maar, born Henriette Theodora Markovitch, was the only child of Croatian architect Josip Marković and the French native Louise-Julie Voisin. After spending some of her early life in Buenos Aires due to her father’s work, Maar moved to Paris in 1926 to study photography and art.
Maar emerged as one of the leading artists in the 1930s when her photographs were exhibited in galleries in London, Paris, and New York, alongside the works of Man Ray and Salvador Dalí. In 1929, she captured pictures of European cities after the Wall Street crash that left America in an economic depression. Those photographs have inspired many future photographers, such as Diane Arbus, Berenice Abbott, and Lee Friedlander.
Some of Maar’s oldest photographs date all the way back to the early 1920s. Over the years, she worked with surrealists on poetry books and galleries and also helped in running an agitprop theatre. Beyond being a surrealist photographer, she was a political activist, an intellectual, and a gifted visual artist.
Maar’s surrealist photomontages often depicted objects in ways that defied logic and often had an absurd twist to them. One of her most famous photographs is ‘The Simulator,’ in which a boy blends with a stone wall. With the boy’s eyes scratched out, the photograph looked even more amusing. This picture was exhibited at London’s International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, along with two other pictures.
1936 was perhaps the year when Maar enjoyed the most fame. Another photograph from that year is ‘Père Ubu (Portrait of Ubu),’ which shows an unidentifiable creature. Some assumed that it was a fetus, a root, or a baby. Maar refused to reveal what it truly was, and now, it is believed that it is an armadillo preserved in a jar.
In 2019, Maar’s work was exhibited at London’s Tate Modern. That same year, a selection of her photographs was exhibited at Paris’s Centre Pompidou and later at Los Angeles’s Getty Center. Louise Baring documented the surrealist photographer’s life and legacy in her book, ‘Dora Maar: Paris in the Time of Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and Picasso.’
Dora Maar Left an Indelible Mark on the Advertising World
At the age of 25, Dora Maar started her studio with her father’s help. The photographs she worked on with fellow photographer Pierre Kéfer graced the glossy covers of fashion magazines and eye-catching advertisements. Her photomontages incorporated surrealist and modernist themes and aesthetics.
In 1936, Maar shot an advertisement for a swimsuit brand in which the model’s body appeared to be floating on rippling water. In another advertisement for the hair care brand Petrole Hahn, she edited the hair oil bottle such that it lay on its side, but instead of oil, curly hair spilled out of it.
For a magazine, Maar shot a series of photographs that challenged the idea of ‘modern women.’ At the time, women were often photographed behind the steering wheels of cars, but in reality, they did not have the license to run those vehicles. Ever a visionary, Maar decided to have models pose beside the cars. The outcome showed that the women’s proportions did not coincide with the cars, which subtly revealed the reality.
Brushstrokes and Heartbreak: Dora Maar in the Shadow and Light of Pablo Picasso
Although Dora Maar first saw Picasso in late 1935 when she was taking promotional photographs for Jean Renoir’s movie ‘The Crime of Monsieur Lange,’ she did not get the chance to meet him until a few days later when their mutual friend and French poet Paul Eluard introduced them. Maar and Picasso dated for 9 years before breaking up in 1945.
Pablo Picasso was also in a relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter during the years that he dated Maar, whose photography career had taken a backseat despite being at the height of it. A woman, so determined to showcase the reality of the world through creative expression, whose political convictions stood firm at a time when women’s voices were often dismissed, had suddenly withdrawn from the world. All of it for love.
Picasso believed that photography was a lower art form and managed to convince Maar to turn to painting. She did as much during the Spanish Civil War, which had greatly inspired Picasso. It was not until he met Maar that Picasso’s paintings began reflecting political themes. She also taught him photography skills and the technique of combining photographs with printmaking.
In 1937, when Picasso was painting ‘Guernica,’ she photographed its successive stages every day during the 36 days that it took him to finish the painting. This made her the first photographer to have captured the creation of modern artwork from beginning to end.
Dora Maar was the muse and model for many of Picasso’s portraits. From the autumn of 1936 to the spring of 1937, she was painted as a tranquil figure. However, he soon began painting her as a tortured and anguished woman in the series of paintings that came to be known as ‘The Weeping Woman’ series, as if weeping was her only feature.
“All portraits of me are lies. They're Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar.” - Dora Maar
The weeping and torture that Picasso showed in the series were his own inflictions on Maar. Not only did he make her fight for his love with Walter, but he also abused her physically and mentally. Dora paid the price for loving a man who did not seem to return what she gave to him, her devoted adoration.
When Picasso met Françoise Gilot, a woman forty years his junior, he decided to end his relationship with Dora Maar, whose nervous breakdown landed her in a psychiatric hospital. The celebrated photographer received electric shock treatment for her heartbreak. After this breakdown, she retreated from the world physically and romantically.
