Picasso's Weeping Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar. - Review - book review

Art in America, June, 2001 by Michele C. Cone

Picasso's Weeping Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar by Mary Ann Caws, Boston, New York, London, Bulfinch Press, 2000; 224 pages, $50.

Would we be interested in Dora Maar and Fernande Olivier, had they never entered the Picasso vortex? Until recently, the answer was no, despite the fact that, prior to meeting Picasso, Maar and Olivier had both achieved unusual independence, the former as a professional photographer and the latter as a popular artists' model. Mary Ann Caws's biography, profusely illustrated with examples of Maar's photographic and painted works, is intended to redress the view of Maar as "just the weeping woman" in Picasso's oeuvre. The private journal of Olivier, with a foreword by Marilyn McCully and an epilogue by John Richardson, is also intended to evidence its author's special talent, in her case as a memorialist.

In her biography of Maar, Caws, best known as a feminist literary scholar and translator of Surrealist texts, is most interested in her subject's brief association with the Surrealists in 1935 and 1936. Caws glosses over Maar's early years in Argentina, where she lived from the age of three to the age of 19, and briefly evokes the young woman's student work in photography done in Parts in the late '20s. Soon she draws our eyes to Maar's first "professional" photographs (coauthored with the man who shared her studio in the early '30s, Pierre Kefer). There is no question that Maar displayed precocious signs of an unconventional, possibly "surreal" turn of mind, as in a double-profile photomontage from the early '30s, a plunging view from the late '20s of a Paris street in the manner of Atget, and a circa 1927 study of a rock formation that calls to mind the wrinkled folds of aged skin. (All of these photographs and more are beautifully reproduced in Picasso's Weeping Woman.)

Like Man Ray, Brassai, Wols and the other photographers of her generation who lived in Paris in the '30s. Maar, though not impecunious (her father was a much sought-after architect), apparently kept herself afloat during the years of the Depression in France by working as a commercial artist. She did photos for ads and fashion shoots for beauty magazines, freelance documentary photography (about the social and political turmoil in Spain, where she traveled alone in 1934), while also experimenting with new photography techniques and surreal imagery.

In the course of the '30s, Maar gleaned techniques and ideas from a variety of mentors, including the founder of L'Illustration, Emmanuel Sougez, who guided her first steps in commercial photography, and the filmmaker Louis Chavance, for whom she photographed movie scenes for advertising purposes (a good preparation for photographing the successive stages of Picasso's Guernica). She also knew Georges Bataille, an authority on the Marquis de Sade, who introduced her to kinky sex and brought her into contact with the Surrealists. Of course, her most famous mentor was Picasso, with whom she started an affair in 1936.

Reproduced in Picasso's Weeping Woman are a number of fascinating photos from Maar's most prolific years, 1935 and 1936, "major pieces [that] show in their different ways the disquieting peculiarities so beloved of Surrealism, the insolite and strange ground of its discoveries and perceptions." Grotesque (1935), a distorted face with missing parts that evokes the gueules cassees, World War I veterans whose unbearable ugliness inspired Surrealist portraiture, is one. The de Chiricoesque 29 rue d'Astorg (1936), featuring a seated headless figure in the foreground and slanting arches behind her, is another. Silence (1935-36), a photomontage, shows a girl seemingly lying on a curved wall that turns out to be a vaulted arch photographed upside down. Also illustrated is Maar's Portrait of Ubu (1936), an image that became a Surrealist icon and, says Caws, "presided over the exhibition of Surrealist objects at Charles Ratton's Gallery as its semi-official mascot." With a head shaped like that of an elephant and hands with long clawlike fingers, it probably portrays a blind armadillo fetus.

Caws does not dwell on the fact that Maar entered Picasso's life just as he became father to Marie-Therese Walter's baby, Maya, a situation that might have alerted a less ambitious individual to the fragility of her own situation. Caws depicts a worldly, successful and mysteriously beautiful femme fatale of Surrealism, who becomes second fiddle and assistant to a famous genius. Caws's book is illustrated with collaborative works by Picasso and Maar from the late '30s, not only indirect examples like Maar's famous photographs of Picasso's Guernica but also etchings in drypoint on exposed acetate film signed by Picasso alone, although, according to Caws, Maar's "skill in the dark room was invaluable to him."

Handsomely produced and well written, the book weakens in its report on the life and work of Picasso and Maar during World War II in occupied Paris. Few of the painted portraits of Maar from the war years are included, although Picasso made many. In the years 1941-43, he portrayed her in a way quite different from the weeping woman of the late '30s--more stoic-looking, seated expectantly in a claustrophobic space, her facial features often horribly distorted by anxiety, though not in tears. Nor does Caws tell us if Maar was ever in danger personally at that time, or if the long-held assumption that her father was in fact a Jew is incorrect.