1936-1938: two faces, one war

One room, two women, the same year

In 1936, Picasso is still officially married to Olga Khokhlova, from whom he lives apart, and has been in a relationship since 1927 with Marie-Thérèse Walter, with whom he has a daughter, Maya, born on 5 September 1935. It is against this already complicated backdrop that Picasso meets Dora Maar, in late 1935 or during 1936: the two relationships overlap for several years, something the dates in Room 14 make concretely visible — a portrait of Marie-Thérèse dated 6 January 1937, portraits of Dora Maar dated October of that same year.

A recognised photographer in Surrealist circles before meeting Picasso, Dora Maar is not merely a model: as a professional photographer she documents several months of Picasso's work in 1937, the best-known episode concerning a painting that is not in this room, but whose genesis is directly reflected in it.

1. The meeting, between legend and established fact

The most often repeated account of the meeting between Picasso and Dora Maar takes place at the Café Les Deux Magots, where the poet Paul Éluard introduces them to one another. Dora Maar, this version goes, was wearing black gloves embroidered with small pink flowers; she takes them off, places her hand on the table, and slowly drives a knife between her splayed fingers, sometimes cutting herself until she bleeds. Picasso, fascinated, is said to have kept the gloves and displayed them in a case at home.

This scene, which has become one of the most widely reproduced founding stories of their relationship, comes from memories recounted after the fact — notably those of Françoise Gilot, a later companion of Picasso's, who had it from Picasso himself — rather than from a direct account dated to 1936. It is repeated today by most biographers without being a first-hand source verifiable in every detail; it is more accurate to present it as the story Picasso liked to tell of their meeting than as an established fact down to the last particular.

2. Two women, two ways of painting

Portrait of Marie-Thérèse (6 January 1937) and Portrait of Dora Maar (1 October 1937) were painted the same year, nine months apart. Art historians have long noted a stylistic contrast between the two women in Picasso's work of this period: portraits of Marie-Thérèse favour soft curves and pastel colours, while those of Dora Maar adopt brighter colours and sharper angles. This contrast is not absolute or systematic from one painting to the next, but it is recognised widely enough among specialists to be worth pointing out to visitors in front of the two canvases in the room.

A second Portrait of Dora Maar, painted in oil and pastel the same day, 1 October 1937, picks up a composition and palette close to the first — loose hair, a centre parting, a hand resting against the face, nails painted red — but on a smaller canvas, 55 x 45 centimetres against 92 x 65. Seen side by side with the first, it shows less hesitation than a motif Picasso keeps working the same day: the same face, caught twice in two different techniques, never quite repeating itself.

The Hairdressing, painted on 22 March 1938, shows a woman doing her hair in front of a mirror — a motif Picasso returns to several times during this period, somewhere between an intimate scene and an exercise in constructing a face seen from several angles at once, a device inherited directly from the Analytic Cubism of 1911-1914.

The Straw Hat with Blue Foliage, painted on 1 May 1936, comes from an entirely different project: during a stay in Juan-les-Pins between April and May that year, Picasso produced drawings almost daily, each accompanied by a poem, multiplying studies of Marie-Thérèse's head. This canvas is the painted outcome: the face, topped with a straw hat pinned with foliage, is distorted almost past recognition, the shoulders and features recomposed into flat planes bordering on still life.

3. In the background, the war in Spain

The Spanish Civil War breaks out in July 1936. On 26 April 1937, a market day, German and Italian aircraft bomb the Basque town of Guernica, killing a number of civilians still debated today. Picasso, who had been working on an entirely different canvas, learns of the bombing from press photographs and immediately begins the painting that would become Guernica, a canvas more than seven metres wide.

Between 11 May and 4 June 1937, Dora Maar photographs, in Picasso's studio on Rue des Grands-Augustins, the various stages of the composition — twenty-eight photographs that make up the first known photographic report on the creation of a major work of art, and which today allow historians to reconstruct precisely how the painting evolved. This activity of Dora Maar's, carried out alongside the sittings for her own portrait, casts the two faces of Room 14 in a different light: not merely portraits of companions, but the traces of two very active presences in Picasso's studio at the most politically charged moment of his career.

Women at Their Toilette, an immense 299 x 448 centimetre collage of cut flowered wallpapers and gouache, was made in that same Grands-Augustins studio the following winter, 1937-1938. It is the only tapestry cartoon Picasso ever designed, commissioned by the dealer Marie Cuttoli — yet he kept it for himself for the rest of his life rather than part with it. Three women are shown at their toilette, their silhouettes cut from patterned paper scraps rather than painted — a method that owes directly to the accumulation of press cuttings and documents that had fed the genesis of Guernica a few months earlier. Historians read it as an evocation of the companions who had succeeded one another in Picasso's life, rather than the portrait of any one woman.

4. Room 16, the sequel: The Weeping Woman and The Suppliant

In Room 16, on the same floor of the Hôtel Salé, The Weeping Woman (La Femme qui pleure; 18 October 1937, oil on canvas, 55.3 × 46.3 cm) continues the series of women’s faces from the year of Guernica: in several portraits where Picasso paints his companion in tears, a link has been seen with the political upheavals shaking Spain.

Two months later, The Suppliant (La Suppliante; 18 December 1937, gouache on wood, 24 × 18.5 cm, inscribed “D.B.G.: 18 D 37”) is a very small panel, received by the museum in 1979 as payment of succession rights.

How much time

Allow about an hour for this room and the next if you stop at each of the eight works, the Spanish war included; about fifteen minutes is enough if you keep only to the direct comparison between the two 1937 portraits.

Background on the context (Olga, Marie-Thérèse, Dora Maar) — 5 minutes.
The meeting with Dora Maar, legend and fact — 5 minutes.
Portrait of Marie-Thérèse (6 January 1937) — 7 minutes.
Portrait of Dora Maar (1 October 1937, oil) — 7 minutes.
Portrait of Dora Maar, oil and pastel (1 October 1937) — 6 minutes.
The Hairdressing (22 March 1938) — 6 minutes.
The Straw Hat with Blue Foliage (1 May 1936) — 6 minutes.
Guernica, the context and Dora Maar's photographs — 6 minutes.
Women at Their Toilette (winter 1937-1938) — 7 minutes.
The Weeping Woman (18 October 1937, Room 16) — 6 minutes.
The Suppliant (18 December 1937, Room 16) — 5 minutes.

Sources and verification

Facts checked against the Musée Picasso Paris and cross-checked sources (Wikipedia FR/EN, TheCollector, Time) for meeting and birth dates and the historical context of 1936-1938.

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The Musée Picasso, Paris

The room where Picasso invented Cubism Studies for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and the road to 1907. Picasso, Braque, and the invention of collage From Analytic Cubism to the first collage, summer 1912.

Listen to the commentary in the gallery

This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.