Picasso's Weeping Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar Hardcover - 2000

From the publisher

In 1936 Maar was a successful Surrealist photographer, unconventional and sexually liberated. Picasso arranged for an introduction and soon she was his lover, his muse, and the subject of some of the greatest paintings of our century. At the height of the affair, Maar photographed the life and friends she shared with Picasso, among them Paul and Nusch Eluard, Jean Cocteau, Andre Breton and his wife Jacqueline Lamba, and Jacques Lacan. Maar's liaison with Picasso was turbulent and impassioned, ending in 1943. The love story between these two exceptionally talented individuals unfolds through Maar's striking photographs of Picasso and their brilliant circle of friends, artists and writers; in his famous weeping woman portraits of her; and in Mary Ann Caw's revealing text. The model for scores of portraits by Picasso and others in museums and private collections all over the world, Dora Maar subsequently became a reclusive figure until her death in 1997 when her estate revealed a treasure trove of her photographs and paintings along with little known paintings and drawings by Picasso and objects collected by her throughout their life together. Drawing on this poignant collection of memorabilia, the book is an enthralling revelation not only of one of the century's great love affairs, involving the century's greatest artist, but of the lives of a wholly exceptional circle of friends, especially during the dramatic events of the 1930s and the war years.