Dora Maar - Life

Life

She was born Henriette Theodora Marković in Paris, France. Her father, Josip Marković, was a Croatian architect, famous for his work in South America; her mother, Julie Voisin, was from a Catholic family from Touraine, France. Dora grew up in Argentina.

Before meeting Picasso, Maar was already known 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 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.