Picasso - Portrait of Dora Maar

1936, Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It is in this chic district in the heart of Paris that the Deux Magots brasserie becomes a place frequented by artists and writers. André Gide, Fernand Léger, Jacques Prévert, Jean Cocteau and Paul Eluard come there to read, write and exchange ideas, over coffee, cigarettes or glasses of wine.

The latter went there one day, accompanied by a friend of his companion. Henriette Theodora Markovitch, her real name, she called herself Dora Maar. She was a photographer and one of the rising figures of the artistic avant-garde. After an experimental start in the same laboratory as Brassaï in Montparnasse in 1930, the young woman enjoyed a certain success with her surrealist peers and exhibited her photographs and photomontages in various Parisian and foreign galleries.

While she plays at poking the table between her gloved fingers with a sharp penknife, she attracts the attention and curiosity of a close friend of Paul Eluard: Pablo Picasso. In reality, Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso already know each other by sight: in fact, they crossed paths on the set of "The Crime of Monsieur Lange", a film directed by Jean Renoir. Dora Maar is there to assist the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson in taking the set photos. Young, beautiful, outgoing, fiery and artistic, Dora Maar becomes a source of inspiration for Picasso, and this for the next seven years.

Portrait of Dora Maar, 1944

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