In these weeks Sky is broadcasting the second season of Genius, the television series produced by National Geographic which traces the life and artistic experiences of the geniuses who have marked the culture, art and science of the twentieth century. The first season was dedicated to the life of Albert Einstein with an extraordinary Geoffrey Rush. The second reconstructs the life and activity of Pablo Picasso interpreted by an inspired Antonio Banderas who had no hesitation in defining this interpretation of him as the role of his life. A character who also stands out in the fiction produced by National Geographic is Dora Maar, photographer and painter, lover of Picasso played by Samantha Colley (already in the first season, where she was the wife of Einstein).
The relationship with Picasso lasted nine years, when in 1943 the Spanish artist left her for the younger Françoise Gilot with whom Picasso had two children Paloma and Claude. After the abandonment of Picasso Dora she fell into a great depression which led her to hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital and was subsequently taken over by Jacques Lacan who also had Pablo in her care. Lacan managed to make her accept her illness. She was the only lover to survive Picasso without committing suicide. The suicide of people emotionally close to Picasso is one of the reasons on which Genius insists. Dora died alone in 1997. By Dora Pablo used to say: "She was mad long before she was mad!" And Dora didn't fail to reciprocate. Speaking of their relationship, she said: «I was not Picasso's lover. He was only my master."
We asked Valentina Sonzogni, historian of architecture and art and archivist at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art for a contribution on this exceptionally talented and fragile woman. Enjoy the reading.
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Il faut etre léger comme l'oiseau et non comme la plume
Paul Valéry
How to Leonora Carrington, Nusch Eluard, Jacqueline Lamba and not a few other artists of her generation, Dora Maar has enclosed in herself and in her work being a woman, muse and artist. Women they were, aware and proud of it. Their mysterious, wild and modern beauty - as it could only be in those years - comes back to us from the black and white photos that portray them with tailored suits in Paris and long caftans in Morocco or lace shirts in France and details ethnics in Mexico. Always traveling in the wake of their passions, these women were citizens of the world to follow their artistic inspiration and, often, their partners and husbands.
Their companions, in fact: Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, André Breton and Pablo Picasso, absolute giants of canvas and pen, restless thinkers of the generation which, through dreams, had found the only possible way of accessing reality between the two wars, in which tomorrow was by no means a certainty. Muses, therefore, happy and trained to be so thanks to their spirit of revolt against conventions (which made them very often lovers, then wives, then lovers at the same time as other wives, and so on), with their bodies squeezed by life and by art, muses often crushed by those men who are modern in the pen and ancient in the head.
Artist
Finally, extraordinary artists. The generation of women and the group of artists to whom Maar was close is undoubtedly one of the fertile basins of the twentieth century imagination, between photography, art and performance of which characters such as Baroness Elsa and Leonor Fini, for example, they were forerunners and teachers. Artists who have been able to interpret Surrealism and femininity in their own way, even the lesser known ones such as the Czechoslovakian Toyen or the extraordinary Ithell Colquhoun.
In 2014 an exhibition was set up at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, Dora Maar. Despite Picasso (Skira catalogue) which also welcomed the work of Dora Maar, which has been arranged in rich sections starting from the numerous portraits for which Maar posed as a subject; to continue with the street photographs through which she documented, especially in the 30s, the conditions of the workers and the poor in Paris and on the Spanish streets; ending with images of her from her period in contact with the Surrealist avant-garde and her life with Picasso, the unmentionable, never forgotten. The exhibition was curated by Victoria Combalìa. The itinerary also recounted this love story with the aim of bringing Maar's talent to light, without indulging either in the fetishism reserved for great artists, or in the voyeurism that they provoke in us, even after many years. with their exciting and messy lives.
After Picasso there is only God
At 29, Dora Maar, daughter of a Croatian architect and a French mother, had already lived in Argentina, where her father supervised important construction sites and had already participated, alongside the Groupe October and George Bataille, to light the fuse that would set fire to the European avant-garde. One day Picasso spots her in the Parisian Café des deux Magots while, playing with a knife between her fingers, she injures herself and, impassive, continues to move, hypnotized, the blade in the minimal space between her fingers, indifferent to the blood that stains the gloves .
Legend has it that Picasso asked Dora for those gloves to jealously guard them in his memories. Legend, because the relationship will evolve in a different way from that mythologized encounter, and will lead them both to accelerate their relationship to the inevitable abyss: Picasso in another bed, Dora declaring "After Picasso there is only God".
Dora takes pictures
The reportage of photos (from the collection of the Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia) taken by Maar of Picasso while he paints Guernica in the months of May-June 1937, are an exceptional testimony of a work that is now considered a symbol and heritage of all peoples and all wars. Picasso is in a tie and clutches his cigarette and work tools in his hand, while concentrated but with a certainty nonchalantly retouch the picture, perhaps before going out to dine at Le Sélect or the Dôme. Then the painting is photographed again, this time without the artist and without the color and suddenly reveals, even to those who have looked at it a million times, a secret plasticity, a profoundly sculptural vocation, the three-dimensional yearning of the figures they seem to scream even louder at the astonished spectator.
Yet in the hands of Dora Maar the camera is not only a careful and insightful eye, but a means to bend with the imagination, to travel from one place to another and between one body and another.
This is how extraordinary photos are born Pere Ubu of 1936 in which the photo of an armadillo puppy, verticalized and placed in front of the viewer as if the animal were also standing, magically becomes a dreamlike and monstrous creature, reminiscent of the unsettling images of Bataille, of which Maar had been the companion, breathing deeply the surreal-entnographic climate of the magazine Documents. Or in the photographic collage on display, Aveugles a Versailles, in which he brings together, against the background of the French palace, a group of blind people who can only meet in that absurd photo, since they were individual people photographed in different and distant places. They seem to look, with their white eyes, at the wonder of the painted vaults and smile, as in a posed photo.
The separation from Picasso and the disease
The manifest and the latent are two of the aspects of Maar's works, which reflect as many sides of her personality and some developments of her tortuous existence. In 1943, after seven years of passion, she separated from Picasso that she had just met Francoise Gilot. Two years later she manifests a worrying depression and is admitted to a clinic in France. Her friend Éluard and Picasso manage to have her personally treated by Jacques Lacan who, indulging her mystical tendency, manages to snatch her from madness, but failing to bring her back to that world that was perhaps too closely tied to her life with Picasso.
In the many years before her death, which occurred in 1997 at the age of ninety, she in fact lived a life bordering on imprisonment, exchanging contacts almost exclusively with religious and with some old friends from the art world. One person in particular, however, had the privilege of conversing with her: Victoria Combalìa, curator of many of her retrospectives, including this one of hers. A curious telephone relationship developed between the two since Maar no longer wanted to meet anyone, seasoned with long dialogues and confidences that served as the basis for the biography written by Combalìa herself, More like Picasso (Circe Ediciones, Barcelona 2013).
Gradiva
Dora Maar was the incarnation, in her own way and in spite of herself, of Gradiva, of "she who shines when she walks", the mysterious woman-muse narrated by the German writer Wilhelm Jensen in the novella Gradiva. A Pompeian fantasy, (later analyzed in a long essay by Sigmund Freud), a figure loved by the Surrealists and portrayed by Andre Masson in a framework full of symbols and references. A tragic and shining heroine who continues to enchant with her extraordinary works narrating dreams, obsessions, passions of a fundamental moment in the artistic career of the twentieth century.
