Jacqueline Roque y Pablo Picasso

How Pablo Picasso’s Wives and Mistresses Inspired His Art

The Spanish artist had a reputation for breaking the hearts of numerous women whom he used as muses for his work.

EUDIE PAK
MAY 28, 2020
ORIGINAL: JUN 21, 2019

Sex, love and art were interconnected in the world of Pablo Picasso, and while some of his supporters would argue he had a demonstrably tender side towards women, it would be difficult to deny that the serial philanderer, by and large, used his wives and mistresses as a means to a self-serving end — that end being his artistic identity.

"There are only two kinds of women, goddesses and doormats," Picasso once said.

Dora Maar / With & Without Picasso: A Biography / Review

Mary Ann Caws

Dora Maar With & Without Picasso: A Biography

Artist: Dora Maar

Author(s): Mary Ann Caws

Format: Hardback

Year published: 2000

Publisher: Thames & Hudson

Total Pages: 224

Illustrations: 228 Illustrations, 87 in colour

Picasso first saw Dora Maar across the Cafe des Deux Magots, where she was sitting alone stabbing the wooden table top between her gloved fingers with a penknife. Poised, beautiful and dramatically unconventional, Dora Maar was the former lover of Georges Bataille and a successful young photographer who produced some disturbingly powerful Surrealist images as well as reportage, portraits and fashion photography.

She was to be Picasso’s lover and muse for seven years. In that time she photographed him at work and play, in the studio and on the beach, alone or with friends such as Man Ray, Andre Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, and Paul Eluard. In earl 1938 she created a unique photographic record of the painting of Guernica, Picasso’s searing protest against the carnage of the Spanish Civil War. Dora’s own features were immortalized in the lamp bearing woman in Guernica and in the harrowing distortions of the Weeping Woman, the image in which Picasso achieved his most acute expression of the public and private anguish of those years.

Their relationship was stormy, and in 1943 reached a painful end. Dora was supported through the traumatic aftermath by her friend Jacques Lacan and went on to outlive Picasso by a quarter of a century. But almost nothing was known of her in those years, for she lived as a religious recluse, painting and writing poetry behind a veil of fiercely guarded privacy; ‘after Picasso, only God’, she once said. As a result, her story acquired an almost mythic tone. She was seen as the tragic muse, a woman forever shattered by the cruel genius Picasso. Mary Ann Caws tells a different story. This book places Dora Maar’s time with Picasso in the scope of a life of ninety years. It talks not about a myth, but about a charismatic, deeply intelligent woman and artist whose recognition is long overdue.

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