Croatian Dora Maar (Markovitch)
Barry Marjanovich
November 5 2000
Love among the artists: Picasso and Dora Marr
at Golfe Juan in the south of France, 1937
The woman who wept
DORA MAAR: With and
Without Picasso: A Biography
by Mary Ann Caws
Thames & Hudson Ł24.95 pp224
WALDEMAR JANUSZCZAK
The end of the affair
Picasso was too energetic a man to choose a dull mistress
and so all the women who passed through his mincer were
fascinating; and always in different ways. Because we know
them through his art, as well as through the various scraps of
anecdotal and biographical material that have accumulated
around them, we know them differently from the way we know
most of the important female players of the 20th century.
Picasso's art has invariably acted as our introduction. Because
his art got to the women first it has shaped our final image of
them to an unusual and, some would say, unwarranted extent.
There will be many more books written about Dora Maar in the
future, and they will provide fuller accounts of her life and work
than the one that Mary Ann Caws manages in this book. But
anyone who ever tackles Maar will encounter the same
overwhelming difficulty: she was Picasso's Weeping Woman
and no matter how often or how forcefully you insist that Dora
wasn't really like that, that there was so much more to her
character than spectacular tearfulness, it is as Picasso's
Weeping Woman that she will always be recognised.
The Weeping Woman is as compelling an image as it is
(Picasso produced scores of variations on it but the painting in
Tate Modern has become the defining one) because the
breakdown in feminine composure that we are witnessing, the
complete giving in to tears, has come to be seen as an echo of
events in the 20th century rather than as a record of Dora
Maar's appearance.
The Weeping Woman arrived in 1937, in time to cry over the
Spanish civil war. She made a lightly disguised appearance in
the century's most savagely eloquent anti-war painting -
Guernica. And by returning as often as she did in the years just
before the outbreak of Hitler's war, she seemed to be both a
premonition of the global conflict ahead and a lament upon it.
Because of the Weeping Woman's impact Maar's face has
been taken from her and given to the history of the 20th
century.
It would be neat to be able to insist here that Maar wasn't
anything like the Weeping Woman in real life. But this does not
appear to be the case either. Everyone who came into intimate
contact with her - especially Picasso - was forced to notice her
dramatic mood-changes. Her storminess seems to have been
unmissable. Her father was a Croatian architect. And being half
Slav, Theodora Markovitch would have cried loudly and a lot.
The rest of the biographical information assembled by Caws is
noticeably scant. Maar was born in Paris in 1907. When she
was three, the family moved to Argentina where Joseph
Markovitch, originally from Zagreb, became "the only architect
who failed to make a fortune in Buenos Aires". The family
returned to Paris when she was 19. Bilingual, beautiful,
storm-tossed, and therefore in need of a harbour, Maar was
surely driven by her personal history to join the nearest
avant-garde. And Paris in the mid 1920s and early 1930s was
packed with displaced international creatives coalescing
effortlessly into noisy action-groups that were anti-this and
anti-that.
Maar signed up with most of them. I particularly admire the
bluntness of the manifesto that she signed for the group calling
itself Counter Attack, insisting upon "death to all slaves of
capitalism". Ah, the good old days of social rebellion.
One of Caws's chief ambitions is to prove that Maar was an
important creative force in her own right. This she does
convincingly. Not so much by what she writes but, more
eloquently, by what she shows. On returning to Paris, Maar
had decided to become a photographer. It is as a photographer
that she certainly deserves our Picasso-less attention. Maar's
best photography was produced after she associated herself
with the ultimate Parisian avant-gardists - the surrealists. It's
kinky stuff. A bossy nude rides a chap in a suit across a stuffy
bourgeois study while an interested small boy spies on them
from under the desk. A pair of sexy female legs open up to
allow a horse's tail to droop between them. Maar's X-rated
imagination, sado-masochistic and effortlessly transgressive,
seems perfectly suited to the textures of surrealism.
While associated with the surrealists, Maar became the lover of
Georges Bataille. Anyone who has read Bataille's creepily,
indeed, staggeringly explicit pornographic masterpiece, The
Story of the Eye, can only guess at what the two of them got
up to. I shudder at the possibilities. But Picasso would have
licked his lips. Maar's meeting with Picasso has come down to
us as a mythical event. The two of them were in the famous
avant-garde hang-out Les Deux Magots when Picasso noticed
her, a beautiful brunette on a nearby table playing with a
penknife by stabbing it rhythmically between her fingers.
Sometimes she missed and cut herself. But still Dora stabbed
on. She was wearing white gloves, and Picasso later asked for
the blood-stained evidence of her antics as a memento. They
became lovers immediately.
Whether it actually happened this way or not, Caws sees the
famous meeting as evidence not of Maar's essential nuttiness -
which would be my reading - but of her profound belief in the
tenets of surrealism, and particularly of her faith in the absolute
power of amour fou. Maar was probably the most imaginative
and intelligent of all Picasso's muses. But in casting her as his
Weeping Woman, he appears to have predicted her future.
After he dumped her, Maar, the fanatical left-winger, had a
nervous breakdown and became a fanatical Catholic recluse.
She was an irrational believer by nature, and her faith in
Picasso should surely be seen in this light. At the auction of
her possessions, held after her death in 1997, it emerged that
she had kept every scrap of his creativity, every photograph,
every notelet. She even kept an annotated smear of Picasso's
blood.
Waldemar Januszczak is the art critic of the Sunday Times.
Dora Maar: With and Without Picasso is available at the
price of Ł21.95 inc p&p on 0870 165 8585
Websites:
http://www.whom.co.uk/dora/doramaar.htm
Online Dora Maar portrait gallery
Books:
Picasso & Dora by James Lord (Phoenix Ł12.99)
Memoir of living with the couple during the second world war