Why Dora Maar is Much More than Picasso's Weeping Woman

The first ever retrospective of Dora Maar's art has just ended at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and will be travelling to London’s Tate Modern and then to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Dora Maar, Nature Morte, 1941

Thank you to Lauma, who shared this link to the BBC Culture site with me.

Dora Maar, Eau, photograph

To quote from the article:

"Dora Maar was one of the most important Surrealist photographers and the only artist to exhibit in all six of the group’s international exhibitions....

"Yet today she is primarily known as Picasso's Weeping Woman. Her tears, obsessively depicted in numerous canvases, seem to show a woman broken by the abusive relationship that contributed to a breakdown and her withdrawal from public life.

"Although a consciously enigmatic woman who left little written evidence about her life and work, Maar deeply resented the image. 'All [Picasso's] portraits of me are lies. They're Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar,' she told the US writer James Lord. In fact, Maar continued to create throughout her life, leaving a vast and highly varied body of work, much of which was only discovered upon her death."

Pablo Picasso, The Weeping Woman

The retrospective exhibition will be staged at Tate Modern from 20 November 2019 to 15 March 2020, and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from 21 April to 26 July 2020.