Pablo et Dora: les sadomasochistes (2018) Painting by Karotte

- »I love your suffering and I paint it! »
Picasso loves nothing as much as women and collects muses and models, a cruel and fanciful seducer, he is jealous and extremely possessive (wouldn't he cloister Fernande in their apartment?). He knows he is unfaithful and demanding in love, with a macho and authoritarian temperament, but he nevertheless considers women to be the keys to his painting, essential to his creation.
- »Painting is never chaste. “, he liked to say.
So it is in a sort of continuous ballet of muses, wives, mistresses and prostitutes that his existence will unfold and punctuate his immense work.

A wild impulse where Greek and Spanish cultures merge, both struck with the tragic seal and the same vibrating lead of the sun, animates his work and makes his relationship with women blaze. A painting dated 1936 entitled Dora and the Minotaur, could well reflect the nature of the relationship that Pablo maintains with Dora Maar the photographer, a sort of ancient allegory of the wild union which unites lovers.
When Pablo meets Dora, he is 54 years old and she is 28 years old. His life is already overflowing with fatal and violent connections, the ideal of what Picasso demands from painting, fury and energy, abundance and burning. It is not a fragile and destitute young girl that Paul Eluard introduces him to on the terrace of “Deux Magots” but a woman with a strong and famous character. A muse like many of her generation, of surrealism, friend of Breton and Brassa who trained her with Man Ray in photography, she runs her own studio, where she poses models and emblematic figures of All Paris. moment when Pablo is going through a difficult, dry period, that she enters his life.
Her temperament, her thirst for freedom, her emancipation, her modernity, her almost virile confidence (she likes to dress like a boy) appeal to Picasso, and suggests an inner fire that burns and whose violence he senses. He therefore becomes her lover, without breaking up with Marie-Thérèse with whom he has a daughter: Maya. But Dora, carried away by passion, accepts everything, prone to storms and explosions. Picasso knows this, and it is with this renewed burst of energy that creative desire will be reborn, exalted by the photographer.

The years during which they will live together are leaden. History invites itself into the euphoric and creative life of Saint-Germain-Des-Prés. The Spanish War will revive his identity and, siding with the Republicans, he embarks on the adventure of “Guernica” in 1937. Dora Maar will follow the progress of the work by carrying out a real report on the painting in progress to be done, inventing the first “work in progress”! This is a first in photography where Dora fully invests herself. Picasso works with her and they are both in creative fusion. But while she immortalizes it, Picasso asks her for total investment, that she enter into his process herself, that she divines its impulses and hesitations, that she draws its secret lines with him. ...And on the advice of the Master, and out of love, she abandoned photography to learn painting. But Dora is not Picasso. Master's evil strategy? Let’s have no doubt about it!
Dora will never achieve the innovative power of her lover, leaving her in a subordinate position which can only delight him. The Minotaur is therefore at work and slowly, methodically, he will carve up his prey, which has become more and more fragile, more and more vulnerable, until he abandons it to its sad frustration and solitude.

Related themes

Pablo PicassoDora MaarLe MinotaureLa Femme Qui PleureCubisme