Maar, Franqoise Gilot and his remarriage to Jacqueline Roque after Olga’s death. So anguishing had these betrayals been, and so little else was left to life, that with his passing she decided to cause her own by hanging.
Dora
Picasso’s most intellectually gifted and avant garde lover was Dora Maar (1907-1997), a follower of Surrealism and something of an artist herself. Dora’s actual name was Henrietta Theodora Markovitch, her mother being French and her father a Yugoslavian architect. She had lived much of her early life in Argentina. They met in 1936 when Picasso was fifty-five and Dora twenty-nine, a strikingly dark, but somewhat remote beauty. Although seemingly emancipated and able to resist his inveiglement, Dora was as vulnerable as Marie-Therese had been and more masochistic. Picasso no doubt sensed masochism, or at least a self-punitive tendency, early in the affair as he watched her play a daring game of driving a sharp knife between her spread fingers.56 This would prove an ominous sign when, later in the affair, Dora became emotionally disturbed at her displacement by Franqoise Gilot. To regain Picasso’s attention, she feigned being attacked; later, when trying to force Picasso to repent his betrayal, she found herself consigned for treatment to the Parisian psychoanalyst Dr. Jacques Lacan. Dora was undoubtedly Picasso’s most disturbed lover who suffered inordinately from involvement with him.
Dora raised Picasso’s political consciousness, making him aware of the onset of fascism in Spain and, indeed, photographing for posterity stages of the famed Guernica of 1937. She stimulated his mind with Surrealist theory from Andre Breton to Georges Bataille (whose mistress she had been), but most of all she opened the way to a tortured portraiture, the most extreme of Picasso’s career. As Brigitte Leal wrote, the portraits of Dora “tolled the final bell for the reign of beauty and opened the way for the aesthetic tyranny of a sort of a terrible and tragic beauty, the fruit of our contemporary history”.57
Portraits of Dora begin with the usual quick, tenderly realistic sketches, only to introduce the expressive elements most salient in Picasso’s deeper reactions. The moment of mutuality was brief when they could jointly paint a picture signed “Picamaar”. The most telling early ink drawing is called simply Composition, August 1, 1936 (Zervos VIII, 295), showing a stylish young woman entering into the presence of an artist-god, attended by Pegasus.58 A mythology was elaborated of male dominance and female submission, with Dora cast in the role of a lamenting latter-day Egeria pining for her lover. But, as Brigitte Leal points out, many of Picasso’s most contorted portraits of Dora reveal confusion as to how to regard her, as if the artist was testing the limits of her moods. Some portraits are dark, somber and enclosed suggesting melancholia, while others are elaborately florid suggesting mania; it is not known whether Dora suffered bi-polar disorder, or might today be termed “borderline”.59 Picasso was seeing something in a woman he had not seen before, eliciting high-risk emotional states for which he dared to find a visual vocabulary. Perhaps he punitively wished to see such tortured emotions on his mother’s face, using Dora as a surrogate. Or perhaps he simply wanted visual equivalents for the extremes of attraction and revulsion when Dora was forced out of her usual intellectual sophistication. Most of these startling portraits capture bizarre emotional states, but there are a few so physically grotesque as to signal revulsion from her body: Woman Dressing her Hair (Dora) of 1940 (Zervos X, 302) is an example. The more than usually grotesque portraits of the 1940s, such as the dislocated Woman in an Armchair (Dora) of 1941-2, (Zervos XI, 374) signal the distraught terminal phase of Picasso’s relations with Dora.
So far biographers have been unable to make complete sense of this relationship, only hinting at hidden pathological features. Leal speaks of Picasso’s interest in “sadomasochistic rituals” with women, of his wish for “absolute domination and his lover’s total submission”.60 Olivier Widmaier Picasso writes, “Devoted to her lover, at the mercy of his whims, Dora complied with the rituals that he imposed on her. The more she submitted to them, the more the experience approached the limits of what was bearable. But Dora eventually got satisfaction from continuing the game of submission and domination, in which she was the consenting slave”.61 It seems that what the good natured Marie Therese began by laughing at was re-enacted with Dora, a much more complicated, daring and self-punitive woman. Yet there is no sense of gratified reciprocity anywhere in her portraits, with Picasso preferring to image only the alienated suffering. Few viewers of the Dora portraits stop to ask why Picasso should have wanted to paint such unrelieved misery. The “satisfaction” of which Olivier Picasso speaks seems to have been mainly Picasso’s. Speaking of the brutality of Woman [Nude] Dressing her Hair, Arianna Huffington writes that Picasso “often beat Dora, and there were many times when he left her lying unconscious on the floor”.62 Unfortunately, there is no direct confirmation from Dora herself of this shocking allegation, only hearsay evidence of physical abuse. James Lord who knew Picasso and Dora in later years, interviewing her extensively, asked few of the right questions about sexual abuse, being more interested in his own homosexual responses to Picasso and to her. Lord does quote Dora as saying of Picasso: “He used me until he felt there was nothing left of me. The hundreds of portraits of me he painted”. When he left “he expected me to die without murmur of complaint”.63 But we do not know enough about the obedience and submission games played so damagingly with Dora. It is worth considering, but probably beyond proving, that she was asked to take the reverse role, humiliating him in mother-son playacting. Temperamentally, she would probably not have been very good at playing the domineering mother, taking the side of sufferers as she customarily did. The balance of power was such that she cried, not he, the “crying woman” being his preferred motif. We may never know both sides, or be able to gauge how much of his mother Picasso saw in Dora. Picasso readily felt contempt for her vulnerability, exploiting weakness the more it appeared. The affair with Dora became another occasion for enacting an ineradicable punitive wish from childhood. He claimed never to have loved her, yet at the start he had lavished affection and gifts; his narcissism stood in the way of seeing the deteriorating relationship from Dora’s point of view and of reversing and atoning for cruelty. As time went on, no longer exciting or challenging, Dora became only a depressed victim. She was frightened by Picasso, who had undermined her confidence as an artist, yet she could not relinquish him, always cherishing a trove of his small gifts. When the poet Paul Eluard asked her to marry him she turned him down saying, “After Picasso, only God”.64 She tried by a life of austerity and devotion to replace the shaggy Minotaur artist-god with a truer god of love, but after what Dora had endured, this proved difficult and mainly she sought seclusion. Picasso had typified Dora as always crying, seen in the unforgettable Weeping Woman of 1937 (Zervos IX, 73), and finally he reduced her to a Kafka-like insect.65
Picasso and Dora avoided the emotional reality of each other in a degrading endurance test. Neither took effective reparative measures as the binary system of egos broke down. Her analyst Jacques Lacan failed to help Dora see clearly the master-slave re-enactment of childhood traumas as they had taken shape on each side, and how it was that both defensively excluded the feelings that could have revealed why theirs was an impossible relationship.