The same woman looking from the same window on the cover of (left) Paris 1935 by Jean Follain, translated by Kathleen Shields, published by CBe last April, and (right) The Paris Muse by Louisa Treger, published by Bloomsbury on 4 July.
The woman is Dora Maar and the photograph is a self-portrait. Dora Maar is currently receiving attention: as well as the book by Louisa Treger (‘a novel’), an exhibition of her photographs opens this week at the Amar Gallery in London, and a play titled Maar, Dora will be performed at the Camden Fringe in August.
Good. But let’s look how our attention is sought, and the language used. The headline to a piece in the Observer yesterday describes Maar as ‘Picasso’s tormented muse’; the first paragraph begins: ‘Dora Maar is renowned as Pablo Picasso’s “weeping woman”, the anguished lover who inspired him to repeatedly portray her in tears. Now a London gallery is seeking to re-establish her as a pioneering surrealist artist in her own right.’ (The italics are mine.) The blurb for the Bloomsbury book begins: ‘“Living with him was like living at the centre of the universe. It was electrifying and humbling, blissful and destructive, all at the same time!!??”' (The exclam and query punctuation marks are my own.) And continues: 'Paris, 1936. When Dora Maar, a talented French photographer, painter and poet, is introduced to Pablo Picasso, she is mesmerized by his dark and intense stare. Drawn to his volcanic creativity, it isn’t long before she embarks on a passionate relationship with the Spanish artist that ultimately pushes her to the edge.’ The blurb for the play on the Camden Fringe website does better: ‘Dora Maar (1907–1997) was a prolific photographer and artist, developing her career in fashion photography, before hailing as one of the first women in the surrealist movement. She used her creations as a social commentary on beauty, gender and war. However in today’s conversations, her name only appears after a man’s: the infamous Pablo Picasso. He needs no introduction (and we are not inclined to give one, he'll do it for us anyway).’
In 2019 Dora Maar’s work was shown at the Tate in an exhibition jointly organised with the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Guardian review was headlined: ‘Dora Maar: how Picasso’s weeping woman had the last laugh’. In 2022 an exhibition of her contact prints was shown at the Huxley Parlour gallery in London, trailed by a Guardian article headlined ‘Dora Maar: Hidden photos by the artist include intimate portraits of Picasso’. If a woman artist takes a lover who is, or becomes, more famous than she is, how many times does she need to be ‘rediscovered’ before she allowed to exist in her own right?
I understand the mechanism. Praise to the curators who do the rediscovering, but they do so within a cultural context (art history, journalism) that is still deeply sexist. (I don’t doubt that some people who go to the shows still believe that Maar’s work is being shown because of her connection with Picasso.) I am not immune. On the copyright page of Paris 1935 I describe Dora Maar as ‘photographer, painter, Surrealist, activist, and teacher and lover of Picasso’ – dragging in the big name when, I now think, I should have left him out. But it is a good photo, and please buy Paris 1935.
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