Light into darkness

When Picasso changed women, Dora Maar once observed, every thing else altered: the way he painted, where he lived, the poetry he read and wrote, even his dog. The late John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, called this ‘Dora’s Law’. But, like all generalisations, it was subject to exceptions and qualifications.

In the early months of 1937, for example, it could not precisely be said that he had changed his lover. It was more that his private life was in a turbulent process of transformation: an extremely Cubist and perhaps creatively stimulating state to be in.

This was a point of transition – or perhaps a better description would be rapid alternation – bet ween the recent past and the future. It was at this moment that Femme au béret mauve was painted, on the 27 March: a Saturday.

Just then Picasso was in love with two different women, living in t wo separate places: Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar. The former was installed with her and Picasso’s one-year-old daughter Maya (short for María de la Concepción) in a house at Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre, some 28 miles from Paris. Dora Maar, meanwhile, was living in an apartment at 6 rue de Savoie in Paris, within easy reach of Picasso’s own new studio at 7 rue des Grands Augustins.

Moreover, the artist’s estranged wife Olga was still in his life, since she stoutly resisted all suggestions of divorce. She was occupying the beautiful 18th-century country house at Boisgeloup, which the painter much regretted having to relinquish. Even by his standards, Picasso’s emotional life was unusually complicated.

Girl Before a Mirror, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Femme au béret mauve, 1937. Estimate: US$ 10,000,00 - 15,000,000 (£8,000,000 - 12,000,000)

Marie-Thérèse Walter with her mother’s dog Dolly, 1932

Marie-Thérèse had dominated his art and heart since they had first met in 1927. She had been the subject of some of the finest works of Picasso’s entire career, including such masterpieces as Le Rêve, Nude in Black Armchair and Nude, Green Leaves and Bust from 1932.

Passionate and prolonged though their liaison had been, subterfuge was necessary. Thus, in the summer of 1933, Picasso had gone on holiday with Olga and their son Paulo, but surreptitiously brought Marie-Thérèse along too and put her up in a hotel nearby

At the end of the following year, 1934, by way of a present on Christmas Eve, she announced she was expecting a baby. “He fell on his knees, wept and told me it was the greatest happiness of his life.” Or, at least, that was how she remembered it. According to John Richardson, he promised: “Tomorrow I will get divorced!” (In practice, there were legal obstacles.)

When Maya was born, the following September, again according to Richardson, at first “Picasso proved to be a surprisingly good, hands-on father; he even did the cooking and housekeeping. But domestic bliss did not last long. He was soon off on the prowl.

The following year, he met Dora. There are several versions of just how and where. One version is that the encounter was at a café, Les Deux Magots, where she was playing an alarming Balkan game involving rapidly driving a sharp knife bet ween her fingers (later to become the theme of a performance piece by Marina Abramović). Alternatively, and more prosaically, she and Picasso may have been introduced at a cinema by the poet Paul Éluard. In either case, they spent the summer of 1936 together.

A new ‘period’ had begun, but the previous one had not altogether ended. Of ten at the weekend and sometimes during the week, Picasso’s chauffeur drove him to Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre in his splendid Hispano-Suiza. A series of paintings resulted from these family visits, among them Femme au béret mauve – which is offered at Bonhams’ Impressionist and Modern Art sale in New York in May. The subject is distinctly Marie-Thérèse: her hair is blonde, whereas in pictures and life Dora was dark.

The pictures done in Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre continued to be concerned with the subjects Marie-Thérèse had always suggested to him: sensuality, but also domestic peace, love and calm. The outside world, however, was becoming more and more threatening. The previous July, General Franco had begun a right-wing revolt against the Republican government of Spain. At the beginning of February, his forces had taken Malaga, the place of Picasso’s birth. In this menacing context, as Richardson put it, Marie-Thérèse “stood for peace and innocence at the mercy of the forces of evil”.

Marie-Thérèse Walter nursing Maya, April 1936

Woman in Hat and Fur Collar (Marie-Thérèse Walter), 1937, Museu Nacional d’Art

The previous month, the Spanish Government had approached Picasso with a proposal that he should produce a major work for the Spanish Pavilion at the coming Paris World’s Fair. He was turning over the idea in his mind. On 8 January, he signed the first of t wo etchings in the st yle of strip-cartoons, expressing his disgust, outrage and derision at what was happening. These were entitled The Dream and Lie of Franco. Meanwhile, his routine and works continued to alternate bet ween Paris and Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre, Marie-Thérèse and Dora.

It ’s not so surprising that there was a degree of blending bet ween thet wo women in the pictures of this era. In one image of Marie-Thérèse from later in 1937, there is a shadow behind her face: it seems to indicate the other women in Picasso’s life and mind.

“Are we to paint what ’s on the face”, he famously asked, “what ’s inside the face, or what ’s behind it?” A corollary to that is that a portrait may also include what ’s behind the artist ’s face: in his mind. There may be hints of Dora in the brighter colours and sharper profile of this picture. Perhaps Picasso was mentally comparing and contrasting them, or possibly they tended to fuse in his imagination.

Although Dora was in Paris living just around the corner, she was not allowed to visit the painter uninvited. This was partly, one guesses, to allow Picasso to work without distractions. It was noted that, even on holiday with his Surrealist friends, when the others suggested af ter lunch that everyone go to bed (preferably with someone else’s partner) Picasso instead would exclaim au travail, au travail! – “to work!” Keeping Dora penned up at 6 rue de Savoie, however, would also have minimised awkward encounters; much though Picasso apparently enjoyed these, not withstanding the disruption caused.

Nonetheless, one such meeting does seem to have occurred. The painter told the story to Dora’s successor, Françoise Gilot. One day in 1937, perhaps in May since he was apparently at work on Guernica at the time, Marie-Thérèse came into the studio. She found Dora there, who was making a photographic record of the progress of this masterpiece and also functioning as something Picasso almost never had: a studio assistant (she executed some of the lit tle parallel strokes on the horse’s side).

According to the story Gilot related, Marie-Thérèse lost her temper: “I have a child by this man. It ’s my place to be here with him. You can leave right now!” Dora retorted: “I have as much reason as you have to be here. I haven’t borne him a child, but I don’t see what difference that makes.” Eventually Marie-Thérèse turned to Picasso and insisted: “Make up your mind. Which one of us goes?”

Picasso couldn’t decide: “I liked them both, for different reasons: Marie-Thérèse because she was sweet and gentle and did whatever I wanted her to, and Dora because she was intelligent… I told them they’d have to fight it out themselves. So they began to wrestle.”

Both women denied this tale was true, but Richardson was inclined to believe it – and the highly plausible pay-off with which Picasso ended the anecdote. This brawl, he reminisced, was “one of my choicest memories”.

Bust of a Woman: Marie-Thérèse, 1931, on display in the Museum of Modern Art’s 2015 exhibition ‘Picasso Sculpture’

Portrait of Marie-Thérèse with Garland, 1937, Private collection

Guernica, in front of which this fight is supposed to have taken place, is a painting into which arguably the features of both are interfused. Richardson thought Marie-Thérèse appears “twice – maybe three times” in that epic vision: as “the desperate girl running from right to left ”, “the girl clutching a lamp emerging from an upper window” and, finally, perhaps “the mother wailing over her dead child on the left ”.

Mary Ann Caws, biographer of Dora Maar, feels that Dora is the women holding the lamp, though she acknowledges that this figure is also derived from the girl with the lamp in the great Minotauromachy (La Minotauromachie) print from 1935, who was in turn yet another avatar of Marie-Thérèse. The thing about his pictures of Dora, Picasso revealed, was that they tended to turn out fraught, distressed, anguished, in the manner of Weeping Woman from October 1937: not because they didn’t laugh and have fun together; something more profound was at work. The intensity of her personality, perhaps, was in tune with the times.

Working out what is happening in a Picasso can be bewildering. The artist himself admit ted he spent hours while he was at work, “observing my creatures and thinking about the mad things they are up to”.

Jean Cocteau – poet, film director and courtier to the great artist – described that studio at 7 rue des Grands Augustins. It was a wonderful space that Dora had found for him, located in the at tic of a grand 17th-century townhouse. In Cocteau’s words, once Picasso had taken up occupation, it was filled by, “A regal disorder, a regal emptiness – haunted by the monsters he invents, who compose his universe.”

“Picasso is a man and a woman deeply entwined”, Cocteau explained. “He’s a living ménage: the Picasso ménage. Dora is a concubine with whom he is unfaithful to himself. From this ménage marvellous monsters are born.”

Sometimes, when Picasso painted or drew Marie-Thérèse, he was also, explicitly, depicting himself. At others, while the self-portrait – of his mood, his feelings – remained at least implicit, he was depicting a second, absent person: the third person in the ménage. This was the case with several pictures from 1937, of which Femme au béret mauve is a remarkable example.

One of the many attractions of the studio at 7 rue des Grands Augustins was that it was said to be the fictional location of a story by Balzac which intrigued many artists – and obsessed Picasso. It concerned Frenhofer, a 17th-century master who worked for ten years at tempting to perfect a painting of a beautiful woman. But nothing recognisable resulted, just a mêlée of paint strokes from which just a single foot protruded.

Portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter, 1937, Private collection

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Femme au béret mauve, 1937. Estimate: US$ 10,000,000 - 15,000,000 (£8,000,000 - 12,000,000)

Picasso had illustrated this tale with a series of meditations on the subject that preoccupied him perhaps more deeply than any other: the relationship bet ween artist and model. Which is which? Where does one cease and the other begin?

Martin Gayford’s most recent book, Shaping the World, co-authored by Antony Gormley, is published by Thames & Hudson.