Given her tremendous intellect and dark beauty, Dora Maar (1907–1997) is often juxtaposed with the tranquil prettiness and natural sexuality of Marie-Thérèse Walter. Picasso met Maar in 1936, and through the 1930s and early 1940s the Spaniard created hundreds of images of his new muse. As an artist herself, Maar was necessarily more active in Picasso’s life than many of the women who had come before her, and the way in which he portrays her is both profoundly attractive and often deeply disturbing. Jagged lines and angles, whether in paint, pencil or etchings like this one—done with a scraper and aquatint—describe her intense features. Gone are the fluidity and surrealist reduction of Walter’s rounded physicality—replaced, as it were, with Maar’s angular intensity. Picasso’s approaches to depicting these two women, using two divergent stylistic means, exemplify how much his portraiture was connected to both his artistic development and to his sitters.
Details
- Artist Name: Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973)
- Title: Head of Woman, No. 3 (Dora Maar)
- Date: 1939
- Medium: Aquatint and scraper printed in Prussian blue on thin Japan paper
- Edition: Artist proof
- Dimensions: 12 1/8 x 9 1/4 in. (30.8 x 23.5 cm)
- Printer: Lacouriere
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Museum, Museum Purchase, Fellows Acquisition Fund
- Accession Number: P.1978.3
- Copyright: © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Object Information
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Seven Decades of Picasso
- Norton Simon Museum, 1984 to 1986
Seven Decades of Picasso
- Norton Simon Museum, 1979-10-11 to 1980
- Fryberger, Betsy G. and Gloria Williams, Clinton Adams, David Carrier, and Pat Gilmour, Picasso: Graphic Magician, Prints from the Norton Simon Museum, 1998, color pl. 1 pp. 99, 133,
- Campbell, Sara, Collector Without Walls: Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best, 2010, cat. 1511 p. 415
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