Dora Maar (November 22, 1907 – July 16, 1997) was a French photographer, poet and painter of Croatian descent, best known for being a lover and muse of Pablo Picasso.
1_Life
She was born Henriette Theodora Marković in Paris, Western France to a Jewish family. Her father, Josip Marković, was a Croat architect, famous for his work in South America; her mother, Julie Voisin, was from Touraine, France. Dora grew up in Argentina. Before meeting Picasso, Maar was already famous as a photographer. She also painted. She met Picasso in January 1936 on the terrace of the Café les Deux Magots in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, when she was 29 years old and he 54. The famous poet Paul Éluard, who was with Picasso, had to introduce them. Picasso was attracted by her beauty and self-mutilation (she cut her fingers and the table playing “the knife game”; he got her bloody gloves and exhibited them on a shelf in his apartment). She spoke Spanish fluently, so Picasso was even more fascinated. Their relationship lasted nearly nine years.
Maar became the rival of Picasso’s blonde mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who had a newborn daughter with Picasso, named Maya. Picasso often painted beautiful, sad Dora, who suffered because she was sterile, and called her his “private muse.” For him she was the “woman in tears” in many aspects. During their love affair, she suffered from his moods, and hated that in 1943 he had found a new lover, Françoise Gilot. Picasso and Paul Éluard sent Dora to their friend, the psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, who treated her with psychoanalysis.
She made herself better known in the art world with her photographs of the successive stages of the completion of Guernica, which Picasso painted in his workshop on the rue des Grands Augustins, and other photographic portraits of Picasso. Together, she and Picasso studied printing with Man Ray. Maar
kept his paintings for herself until her death in 1997. They were souvenirs of her extraordinary love affair, which made her famous forever. In Paris, still occupied by the Germans, Picasso left to her a drawing from 1915 as a goodbye gift in April 1944; it represents Max Jacob, his close friend who had just died in the transit camp of Drancy after his arrest by the Nazis. He also left to her some still lifes and a house at Ménerbes in Provence.
2_After Picasso
After her long relationship with Picasso ended, Maar struggled to regain her emotional footing. This was complicated by the sudden death of her best friend, Nusch Eluard, wife of the poet Paul, in 1946. Likewise, her mother had also died unexpectedly in 1941, leaving Maar without family or long-time close friends. But eventually she returned to her previous social circle, which included famous society hostesses and art patrons such as Marie-Laure de Noailles and Lise Deharme. She also found solace in Roman Catholicism. The author Mary Ann Caws quotes Maar as saying, “After Picasso, God.” She spent her last years living between Paris and Provence in the house Picasso had given her. Although she had other male friends in her life, such as the gay writer James Lord, a close friend who lived with her in the house in Provence in the 1950s, no one replaced Picasso for her. Maar’s poetry is notable for its themes of near-religious meditation. Caws in her 2000 book on Maar quotes several pieces such as one entitled “5 November”, thought to have been written in 1970:
“Pure as a lake boredom
I hear its harmony
In the vast cold room
The nuance of light seems eternal
All is simple I admire
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