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Lot Essay
The portraits that Pablo Picasso made in the years immediately before and during the Second World War are recognized as being among the greatest of his career. These works not only presented a new form of portraiture that combined both a daring formal experimentation with a deep psychological resonance, but they also continue serve as poignant expressions of the power of artistic creativity in the face of persecution, terror and violence.
Painted on 12 March 1941, during the long, dark years of the Occupation of Paris, Femme au chapeau is one such work. Faced with the decision of fleeing France, Picasso ultimately chose to remain in the capital, his adopted home since the early 1900s. Here, he gradually closed himself off from the world of the avant-garde that he had inhabited, and, holed up in his large studio on the rue des Grands Augustins, continued to work with an indomitable, unstoppable power.
The female sitter in Femme au chapeau was the artist’s companion and lover of this intense, turbulent and traumatic period: Dora Maar. It is her presence and her image, her artistic sensibility, as well as her work as a photographer and painter, that inspired this torrent of portraiture; her physiognomy rendered in an extraordinary diversity of styles as Picasso distorted and manipulated, divided and reconstructed, her visage into an endless range of pictorial possibilities. As Brigitte Léal has written, “the innumerable, very different portraits that Picasso did of [Dora] remain among the finest achievements of [Picasso’s] art... Today, more than ever, the fascination that the image of this admirable, but suffering and alienated, face exerts on us incontestably ensues from its coinciding with our modern consciousness of the body in its threefold dimension of precariousness, ambiguity, and monstrosity” (Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 385).
Here, the face of Dora has been distilled to become a flat, geometric form; her features reduced to two sign-like eyes, and three lines that demarcate her nose and unsmiling, drawn lips. Amidst a tightly enclosed space, this austere, emotionless head is contrasted by the straw hat that sits atop her helmet-like mass of raven-colored hair. Decorated with two bright blooming flowers, this accoutrement lends a moment of lightness and spontaneous femininity to this powerful portrait—appearing here like a relic of carefree summer days spent perhaps in the countryside or the south of France, in happier times before the darkness of war and the Occupation descended.
This visage is a far cry from the anguished head that appeared in Picasso’s famed Weeping Women series of 1937. Painted after Guernica, as the artist’s native Spain was consumed by civil war, and the rest of Europe slid ever nearer to conflict, these works, which were similarly inspired by Dora, not only tell of Picasso’s own reactions to the horrors unfolding, but they express the sentiments of a world on the brink. Four years later, in 1941, the unthinkable had happened. Much of Europe was now occupied by Nazi forces, including Paris, which had fallen in June the year prior. In Femme au chapeau, the lines of emotion that were literally riven into the visage of the Weeping Women have hardened, leaving an impenetrable façade numb to the unthinkable catalogue of catastrophes that had taken place.
Picasso and Dora are said to have met for the first time at the end of 1935 or the beginning of 1936, depending on different accounts. Born in Paris in 1907, Henriette Theodora Markovitch, as she was known before she later shortened her name to Dora Maar, grew up in Argentina before returning to Paris aged nineteen, where she studied painting and photography. In 1930 she began to work as a commercial photographer, producing fashion, advertising, and architectural photographs and portraits. During this same period, she also created her own Surrealist work, including photomontage and street photography, capturing chance encounters that turned the everyday into the uncanny.
By the mid-1930s, her art had placed her firmly amid the Surrealist circles of Paris. She was also actively politically: in 1934 she signed the Appel à la lute, along with the likes of André Breton and Paul Éluard, in opposition to the right wing riots that had taken place, and subsequently she joined Contre-Attaque, a political group formed to oppose Fascism. Along with a number of other Surrealist artists and writers, this movement also included Georges Bataille, with whom Dora began a relationship.
With her experimental photography and her active political engagement, Dora became a key figure within the avant-garde of these pre-war years. As Paul Gilson, a writer, remarked on the occasion of an exhibition including Maar’s work, “It is easier than ever to distinguish those who settle for the title of photographer-revolutionaries and those who prove themselves to be revolutionary photographers. These latter, more rare, are the ones that matter: in their group we find, unsurprisingly, John Heartfield […] Man Ray, Brassaï, Dora Maar” (quoted in A. Maddox, K. Ziebinska-Lewandowska and D. Amao, Dora Maar, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2019, p. 49).
Though they likely knew of each other already by this point, it was Picasso and Dora’s mutual friend, Paul Éluard, who is said to have introduced the two artists. “It was not at Le Flore…but at Les Deux Magots that, one day in autumn 1935, [Picasso] met Dora Maar,” the photographer and friend of the artist, Brassaï, recalled. “On an earlier day, he had already noticed the grave, drawn face of the young woman at a nearby table, the attentive look in her light-colored eyes, sometimes disturbing in its fixity. She had been moving in Surrealist circles since 1934. When Picasso saw her again in the same café in the company of Paul Éluard, who knew her, the poet introduced her to Picasso. Dora Maar had just entered his life” (quoted in A. Baldessari, Picasso: Love and War, 1935-1945, Paris, 2006, p. 36).
This first meeting has now become legendary. As one writer recalled: “the young woman’s serious face, lit up by pale blue eyes which looked all the paler because of her thick eyebrows; a sensitive uneasy face, with light and shade passing alternately over it. She kept driving a small 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” (J.-P. Crespelle, quoted in M.A. Caws, Dora Maar with & without Picasso, London, 2000, p. 81).
This enigmatic woman proved irresistible to the Spanish artist. Beguiled by this dramatic, erotic display, Picasso was immediately attracted to her dark intensity, her ability to answer him in his own mother tongue, and struck by her gaze that was said to be as powerful as his own notorious mirada fuerte. Against the backdrop of the impending war, the two began a passionate and tumultuous affair. As with previous lovers, Picasso first absorbed Dora, her appearance, demeanor, and character, depicting her in a series of intimate sketches and drawings as if internalizing her image, before at the end of 1936, he began to distort and play with her visage in his work. In the throes of their intense relationship, Picasso depicted her with an obsessive passion. “She was anything you wanted,” he recalled to James Lord, “a dog, a mouse, a bird, an idea, a thunderstorm. That’s a great advantage when falling in love” (quoted in ibid., p. 90).
Gradually this stylization and deformation intensified, as Picasso fashioned the angular, complex physiognomic construction for which Dora is now famous in his work—as Femme au chapeau exemplifies. “Ultimately,” Léal has written, “the beloved face is crystallized into a representation that is specific to it, in which it submits to the dominant plastic research…without losing any of its truth” (Brigitte Léal, op. cit., p. 386). Inspired in part by her own personality—she was introspective and intensely feeling, and as Bataille described “inclined to storms, with thunder and lightning”—Picasso used Dora as mirror to reflect both of their emotions, her portraits serving as haunting reflections of life in this epoch of terror (quoted in P. Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 243).
Painted on 12 March 1941, during the long, dark years of the Occupation of Paris, Femme au chapeau is one such work. Faced with the decision of fleeing France, Picasso ultimately chose to remain in the capital, his adopted home since the early 1900s. Here, he gradually closed himself off from the world of the avant-garde that he had inhabited, and, holed up in his large studio on the rue des Grands Augustins, continued to work with an indomitable, unstoppable power.
The female sitter in Femme au chapeau was the artist’s companion and lover of this intense, turbulent and traumatic period: Dora Maar. It is her presence and her image, her artistic sensibility, as well as her work as a photographer and painter, that inspired this torrent of portraiture; her physiognomy rendered in an extraordinary diversity of styles as Picasso distorted and manipulated, divided and reconstructed, her visage into an endless range of pictorial possibilities. As Brigitte Léal has written, “the innumerable, very different portraits that Picasso did of [Dora] remain among the finest achievements of [Picasso’s] art... Today, more than ever, the fascination that the image of this admirable, but suffering and alienated, face exerts on us incontestably ensues from its coinciding with our modern consciousness of the body in its threefold dimension of precariousness, ambiguity, and monstrosity” (Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 385).
Here, the face of Dora has been distilled to become a flat, geometric form; her features reduced to two sign-like eyes, and three lines that demarcate her nose and unsmiling, drawn lips. Amidst a tightly enclosed space, this austere, emotionless head is contrasted by the straw hat that sits atop her helmet-like mass of raven-colored hair. Decorated with two bright blooming flowers, this accoutrement lends a moment of lightness and spontaneous femininity to this powerful portrait—appearing here like a relic of carefree summer days spent perhaps in the countryside or the south of France, in happier times before the darkness of war and the Occupation descended.
This visage is a far cry from the anguished head that appeared in Picasso’s famed Weeping Women series of 1937. Painted after Guernica, as the artist’s native Spain was consumed by civil war, and the rest of Europe slid ever nearer to conflict, these works, which were similarly inspired by Dora, not only tell of Picasso’s own reactions to the horrors unfolding, but they express the sentiments of a world on the brink. Four years later, in 1941, the unthinkable had happened. Much of Europe was now occupied by Nazi forces, including Paris, which had fallen in June the year prior. In Femme au chapeau, the lines of emotion that were literally riven into the visage of the Weeping Women have hardened, leaving an impenetrable façade numb to the unthinkable catalogue of catastrophes that had taken place.
Picasso and Dora are said to have met for the first time at the end of 1935 or the beginning of 1936, depending on different accounts. Born in Paris in 1907, Henriette Theodora Markovitch, as she was known before she later shortened her name to Dora Maar, grew up in Argentina before returning to Paris aged nineteen, where she studied painting and photography. In 1930 she began to work as a commercial photographer, producing fashion, advertising, and architectural photographs and portraits. During this same period, she also created her own Surrealist work, including photomontage and street photography, capturing chance encounters that turned the everyday into the uncanny.
By the mid-1930s, her art had placed her firmly amid the Surrealist circles of Paris. She was also actively politically: in 1934 she signed the Appel à la lute, along with the likes of André Breton and Paul Éluard, in opposition to the right wing riots that had taken place, and subsequently she joined Contre-Attaque, a political group formed to oppose Fascism. Along with a number of other Surrealist artists and writers, this movement also included Georges Bataille, with whom Dora began a relationship.
With her experimental photography and her active political engagement, Dora became a key figure within the avant-garde of these pre-war years. As Paul Gilson, a writer, remarked on the occasion of an exhibition including Maar’s work, “It is easier than ever to distinguish those who settle for the title of photographer-revolutionaries and those who prove themselves to be revolutionary photographers. These latter, more rare, are the ones that matter: in their group we find, unsurprisingly, John Heartfield […] Man Ray, Brassaï, Dora Maar” (quoted in A. Maddox, K. Ziebinska-Lewandowska and D. Amao, Dora Maar, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2019, p. 49).
Though they likely knew of each other already by this point, it was Picasso and Dora’s mutual friend, Paul Éluard, who is said to have introduced the two artists. “It was not at Le Flore…but at Les Deux Magots that, one day in autumn 1935, [Picasso] met Dora Maar,” the photographer and friend of the artist, Brassaï, recalled. “On an earlier day, he had already noticed the grave, drawn face of the young woman at a nearby table, the attentive look in her light-colored eyes, sometimes disturbing in its fixity. She had been moving in Surrealist circles since 1934. When Picasso saw her again in the same café in the company of Paul Éluard, who knew her, the poet introduced her to Picasso. Dora Maar had just entered his life” (quoted in A. Baldessari, Picasso: Love and War, 1935-1945, Paris, 2006, p. 36).
This first meeting has now become legendary. As one writer recalled: “the young woman’s serious face, lit up by pale blue eyes which looked all the paler because of her thick eyebrows; a sensitive uneasy face, with light and shade passing alternately over it. She kept driving a small 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” (J.-P. Crespelle, quoted in M.A. Caws, Dora Maar with & without Picasso, London, 2000, p. 81).
This enigmatic woman proved irresistible to the Spanish artist. Beguiled by this dramatic, erotic display, Picasso was immediately attracted to her dark intensity, her ability to answer him in his own mother tongue, and struck by her gaze that was said to be as powerful as his own notorious mirada fuerte. Against the backdrop of the impending war, the two began a passionate and tumultuous affair. As with previous lovers, Picasso first absorbed Dora, her appearance, demeanor, and character, depicting her in a series of intimate sketches and drawings as if internalizing her image, before at the end of 1936, he began to distort and play with her visage in his work. In the throes of their intense relationship, Picasso depicted her with an obsessive passion. “She was anything you wanted,” he recalled to James Lord, “a dog, a mouse, a bird, an idea, a thunderstorm. That’s a great advantage when falling in love” (quoted in ibid., p. 90).
Gradually this stylization and deformation intensified, as Picasso fashioned the angular, complex physiognomic construction for which Dora is now famous in his work—as Femme au chapeau exemplifies. “Ultimately,” Léal has written, “the beloved face is crystallized into a representation that is specific to it, in which it submits to the dominant plastic research…without losing any of its truth” (Brigitte Léal, op. cit., p. 386). Inspired in part by her own personality—she was introspective and intensely feeling, and as Bataille described “inclined to storms, with thunder and lightning”—Picasso used Dora as mirror to reflect both of their emotions, her portraits serving as haunting reflections of life in this epoch of terror (quoted in P. Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, p. 243).