I don't think I will ever tire of painting with Picasso. Every time
I research him I find more and more information and works of his that
I have not seen before. I found a painting of Dora Marr recently
and decided that since they had such a long relationship, that
I needed to design a composition around her.
He painted many of  her all differently. He must have seen her
in many different ways.


Picasso and Dora Maar - A Mercurial Meeting of Minds

In the winter of 1935 Picasso became intimately involved with
Dora Maar, a stunningly beautiful, passionate and acutely intelligent 
young woman. Dora's influence was to stimulate one of the most
innovative periods of his career. His personal life was in turmoil when
they met: he had broken up with his wife Olga Koklova, a ballet dancer
with the Ballet Russes; and Marie-Thérèse Walter, his mistress since
1927, had given birth to their daughter, Maya. He felt incapable of
painting and instead devoted his creative energy to writing poetry.

Dora Maar was already established in Paris as an acclaimed fashion
and publicity photographer, before her involvement with Picasso.
Aside from her commercial practice she was an innovative Surrealist
photographer, painter, intellectual and political activist. It is easy to
understand how the meeting of Dora and Picasso's  inventive
minds  influenced their work and fed each other's creative
potential.

Picasso and Dora had a complex personal and artistic relationship
that spanned the intense period from the outbreak of the Spanish
Civil War to the end of the Second World War. Picasso once
admitted that for him, Maar had become the personification
of war as he painted her many times during World War II.
Shortly after their first meeting, in the winter of 1935/36, they began
an artistic collaboration. Dora photographed Picasso in her studio at
at 29, rue d'Astorg. These early portraits are important records
that capture Picasso, the guarded professional artist, as he gradually
surrenders to the warmth and tenderness of a close relationship.
Mysteriously, Dora developed some of these portraits but never
printed them. It is almost as if the ethereal nature of the negatives had
captured the soul of the man she loved, a secret she preferred to keep
to herself.

She became Picasso's constant companion and lover from 1936
through April, 1944.  Maar went back to painting and exhibited in
Paris soon after Picasso left her for Françoise. 
In later years she became a recluse, dying poor and alone.

Maar kept many of Piccaso’s portraits of her for herself until she
died in 1997.She suffered Picasso’s moods during their love affair.
Maar and Picasso’s love affair ended in 1944 and Picasso left her
a drawing of 1915 as a good-bye gift.

Read about Dora Marr

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