Picasso: Life with Dora Maar: Love and War 1935-1945

by Anne Baldassari

Dora Maar, born Henriette Théodora Markovitch in 1907, was a talented artist in her own right. While studying painting, she soon found a passion and gift for photography, and became a prominent member of the Surrealist movement. This catalogue traces her relationship with Picasso, from the time of their first meeting in late 1935 through 1937. Picasso expert Anne Baldassari demonstrates how those years were critical for both artists, and how their interaction provided mutual inspiration through the mid-1940s. The relationship is set within the context of major historical events, from the Spanish Civil War and the Popular Front, to the rise of fascism and World War II.

This chronological account brings a legend to life, allowing the reader unique access to two artistic minds. Maar s photographs, alongside Picasso's drawings, paintings, and poems, serve as a guide through the critical period in which these two figures influenced one another. Preserved in her studio archives, Maar's negatives and contact prints allow us to analyze in detail the intimacy of the life she shared with Picasso in all of its states, as well as the evolution of his art, including the colossal Guernica.

This exquisite volume features green-gilded pages and personal mementos—including notes scrawled on matchboxes and small sketches, which are produced on onion skin paper throughout. This book sheds light on the profound mark left upon Picasso and his work by their dynamic relationship.

Genres: Art

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Anne Baldassari (1955 -) is the director of the Musée National Picasso-Paris.

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is it still possible to get excited about books? “Picasso: Life with Dora Maar”---I found this incredible book at a used bookshop for $34.98 and it was a bargain and it makes me feel more alive just looking at it and learning about these creative, fascinating individuals. Dora Maar was Picasso’s lover and muse from around 1935-1945. This book has pictures of her apartment taken in 1997 just after her death, when the Musee Picasso did an inventory of her belongings. Also featured in this book are photos from her archive (Dora’s photomontage surrealist experiments prefigure certain stop-action MTV hard rock music videos). The reproductions of Picasso paintings are uniquely fascinating to me in this book as they show the edges of frayed canvases giving them a sense of humanity and reality, since so many reproductions in art books are too slick to get the feel of a real canvas made of wood and nails and cloth and paint. There is the famous sequence of Maar’s photos of the various stages in the creation of the massive Guernica canvas---and among the items found in her apartment was a ladder which was probably the same one Picasso climbed to paint the upper reaches of the famous mural. . Now here’s the Thing to Do: Buy a book. Right Away like, now. Walk away from the computer…you can do it, I’ve got faith in you. Buy a book. It may be small, large, finely bound, trashy, incoherent, falling apart, unreadable etc---as long as it has potential. You don’t even have to read it right away. Buy it and have fun with it. Add an epilogue to the blank pages at the end. Draw or collage illustrations. Do fun things with your book with your friends. Read aloud back and forth to each other and occasionally improvise additional words to the printed text. Sooner or later though, you will find a need to just sit down somewhere quiet and read it to yourself. Write back and let me know what happens to you and your books.

[Arnoldo Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picasso was interesting because of the people who supported his work. Otherwise, he would have been just like the rest of us, working in obscurity. We know this because of the number of books, studies, reproductions, biographies and words written about Picasso that continue to explore literally all imaginable spaces connected to Picasso's paintings.

"Picasso: Life with Dora Maar" is unique in this ongoing battle to bring Picasso into our collective and growing awareness of his work.

Dora Maar was one of the women that really was IN Picasso's life. Maar was a painter and photographer and, thanks to her foresight, she photographed the painting of "Guernica," one of Picasso's masterworks. She captured the main stages of this obra, ouvre, as it unfolded under Picasso's brushstrokes. Lover and documentarian of Picasso, this new book puts her at a higher and different level in Picasso's life -- as if that's the only way to measure one's life, in relation to another's accomplishments. She was a gifted artist who for a while put up with Picasso.

The uniquenes of "Picasso: Life with Dora Maar"? This book documents Dora Maar's apartment, as it re-tells with refreshing insight and story Picasso's life with her.

After Maar died, a team went into her apartment to photograph its contents undisturbed. Photographs, Picasso graffitti on the walls, old newspaper clippings, her own paintings, Picasso's blood on a scrap of paper that Maar kept as a keepsake, negatives of undeveloped photographs, a living palimpsest of a woman who once loved Picasso and went into her own obscurity alive with her own passions.

"Picasso: Life with Dora Maar" IS an art-book, an artist's book, beautifully designed in a large format. The book contains laid-in letters, notes, art, photographs of Maar's apartment and Maar's photographs. This book lets you wander in Maar's apartment, almost unimpeded, lifting up books, notes, photographs and all kinds of odds and ends that landed in her apartment. You are able to take your time; however, I did get that eerie feeling of being an uninvited guest, a voyeur of sorts, a privileged one at that.

"Picasso: Life with Dora Maar" brings justice to Dora Maar's life with Picasso and elevates her in her own right, leaving Picasso in his place.

[therese · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still reading this actually, but it is fascinating to peer into the great man's life and times. I am especially interested in his partner in art and amour, Dora Maar, as she was not known to me before reading this book. In fact it has been an education to discover more about female surrealists as they seem to have missed out on a lot of popular press regarding this movement. The author is incredibly thorough.