Dora Maar

They met in 1936 in Les Deux Magots where Picasso tended to go after his evening walk. He had dinner with his friend, poet Paul Eluard, while Elf – Picasso’s dog – was cadging at near-by tables. Dora’s and Pablo’s eyes met. Impressed he mumbled a few words in Spanish – the language Dora knew perfectly, since she had spent her childhood in Argentine. They fell into talk, and Picasso moved to her table.

Many years later Picasso told that Dora was wearing black gloves embroidered with rose flowers that evening. She entertained herself stabbing spots between fingers of her left hand lying on the table with a knife. At one point she slipped a fraction of an inch. Picasso asked Dora to give him her blooded gloves. All his life he kept them in a special shadow box.

Dora Maar was a nervous and troubled creature who made it into Picasso’s art as “the weeping woman”. With the image of Maar Picasso made a kind of retrospective journey across his artwork: she was represented in all styles and manners of painting the artist had tried before. However even Picasso himself noted that he could never paint her smiling. The most typical feature of Dora’s portraits are large and deep eyes full of tears, or anxiety, or grief, or just dreamy.

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