Dora Maar au Chat

Dora Maar au chat is one of Picasso’s most spectacular depictions of his mistress and artistic companion (see fig. 1). Picasso's love affair with Maar (1907-1997) was a partnership of intellectual exchange and intense passion that lasted nearly a decade, and Maar’s influence on the artist resulted in some of his most daring portraits of his career. Among the best of them are the oils completed during the war years, when Picasso's art resonated with the drama and emotional upheaval of the era. The luminous Dora Maar au chat was painted in 1941, at the beginning of the Second World War in France and just as the couple's relationship was reaching its fiery climax. This large canvas is one of the most complete and compositionally dynamic depictions from an elite group of portraits from the late 1930s and early 1940s that includes Portrait de Dora Maar dans le jardin (see fig. 2) and Dora Maar assise (see fig. 3). The story of Dora Maar’s relationship with Picasso is legendary in the history of 20th century art. Picasso met Maar, the Surrealist photographer, in the fall of 1935 and was enchanted by the young woman’s powerful sense of self and commanding presence. Although still involved with Marie-Thérèse Walter and still married to Olga Khokhlova at the time, Picasso became intimately involved with Maar by the end of the year, and by 1937 she had ascended to the status of the artist's primary mistress . Unlike the docile and domestic Marie-Thérèse who had given birth to their daughter Maya in 1935, Maar was an artist, spoke Picasso’s native Spanish, and shared his intellectual and political concerns. She even assisted with the execution of the monumental Guernica and produced the only photo-documentary of the work in progress. And as she was one of the most influential figures in his life during this time, she also became his primary model. Looking back on the pictures that he painted of her, Picasso once admitted that Dora Maar had become for him the personification of the war. Her image, which he reinterpreted countless times between 1937 and 1944, embodied all of the complicated and conflicting emotions of life in the midst of occupied Paris. But what first caught Picasso's attention was Maar's transfixing beauty, which is not lost in the present picture and which James Lord described upon meeting Maar in 1944: "Her gaze possessed remarkable radiance but could also be very hard. I observed that she was beautiful, with a strong, straight nose, perfect scarlet lips, the chin firm, the jaw a trifle heavy and the more forceful for being so, rich chestnut hair drawn smoothly back, and eyelashes like the furred antennae of moths" (James Lord, Picasso and Dora , New York, 1993, p. 31). More than most of the women in his life thus far, Dora Maar was Picasso's intellectual equal – a characteristic that the artist found both stimulating and challenging. During the occupation and as tension mounted in their relationship Picasso would express his frustration by furiously abstracting her image, often portraying her in tears. While the present portrait is undeniably appealing and might seem a departure from Picasso's more hostile depictions of his model, it may be, in fact, one of his most brilliant and biting provocations of his Weeping Woman . Picasso once likened Maar's allure and mercurial temperament to that of an "Afghan cat," and the cat in this picture resonates with meaning. In the history of art, the pairing of cats and women was an allusion to feminine wiles and sexual aggression, as exemplified in Manet’s notorious portrait of Olympia (see fig. 4). Surely this significance was not lost on Picasso, who had referenced the cat in some of his earliest and most recent compositions (see figs. 5 & 6) as symbol of women's sexual availability and animalistic nature. Moreover, the cat's inclusion here is yet another opportunity for Picasso to impose his predilections and control on his model. James Lord tells us that after the death of M