The Paris Muse, Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso: the greatest love affair in art history is a stunning and absorbing biography of artist Dora Maar by Louisa Treger.
Preview
Paris, 1936. When Dora Maar, a talented French photographer, painter and poet, is introduced to Pablo Picasso, she is mesmerized by his dark and intense stare. Drawn to his volcanic creativity, it isn’t long before she embarks on a passionate relationship with the Spanish artist that sometimes includes sadism and masochism, and ultimately pushes her to the edge.
The Paris Muse is the fictionalized retelling of this disturbing love story, as we follow Dora on her journey of self-discovery and expression. Set in Paris and the French Riviera, where Dora and Pablo spent their holidays with their glamorous artist friends, it provides a fascinating insight into how Picasso was a genius who side-stepped the rules in his human relationships as he did in his art. Much to Dora’s torment, he refused to divorce his wife and conducted affairs with Dora’s friends. The Spanish Civil War made him depressed and violent, an angst that culminated in his acclaimed painting ‘Guernica’, which Dora documented as he painted.
As the encroaching darkness suffocates their relationship – a darkness that escalates once the Second World War begins and the Nazis invade the country – Dora has a nervous breakdown and is hospitalized.
Review
Atmospheric, intense and moving, The Paris Muse is an astonishing read that ensures that this talented, often overlooked woman who gave her life to Picasso is no longer a footnote.
Louisa Treger has always been interested in exploring through her fiction, female artists and writers who have been overlooked in their lifetime. This theme is profound in The Paris Muse. So often women linked romantically to ‘great men’ – men who can be narcissistic and abusive – are seen only in relation to their part in the man’s work. Their ‘muse’ if you will. But these women – and Dora Maar is a perfect example of this – produced great work themselves. Picasso is interesting too in that there are multiple female artists overshadowed by him in their lifetimes, women who he also actively tried to ruin the careers of.
It starts well, Dora Maar was young, beautiful, passionate, creative when she met Picasso and he found her inspiring. But the honeymoon period doesn’t last, and she becomes known as Picasso’s Weeping Woman, her heart broken by his infidelity and controlling, psychologically traumatising behaviour.
The raw torment of her love for Picasso, the realisation that the emotion is not returned, is heart breaking. There’s no sugar coating of Dora’s complex problems with her family, her lover, her friends and especially with herself. The artist was a conflicted, gifted, and complicated woman, Louisa Treger writes as if she were inside Dora’s head, feeling the passion of first love, and the betrayal of the love of her life, the fear of living in occupied Paris in the war, the punch in the gut feeling of treacherous friends and the loss of a child.
The story is dramatic. Dora feels everything with so much passion, she has no brakes on her emotions. I found myself wanting her to overcome the situation she was in, shake her and tell her to just accept it for what it is – love hurts, you’re a talented woman, don’t give up.
Wonderfully detailed context all the way along places the reader there with her. Paris at war, the south of France with ‘friends’, many of them well-known artists, living a life that made her a part of the toxic lifestyle that Picasso and his cronies lived.
But it’s not all about her love, it’s clear that Dora Maar has enormous talent though she was overshadowed by her lover. And there is pain, most people could not see past Picasso to see the real woman, the talented artist who was his Paris muse.
The book is gripping and pulls you in from start to finish. I read it in two sessions – I couldn’t put it down. And it’s one to read again, the second time slowly, savouring the details.
Deeply researched, this is a beautifully written, finely tuned, unflinching narration that is filled with emotion, weaving past and present together and telling the tale of a remarkable artist and her remarkable, but decimated life.
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing and available in all good bookshops online and in the high street.
