by Zoe Valdes
James irritates me all the time. I can’t make him understand Dora. To top it off, sometimes he mistreats her, his behavior is cynical at best and not very nice. It’s not his fault, I know. Dora is a dejected woman, yet conceited, and she talks too much sometimes and other times, well, she sinks into silence. But he shouldn’t act so rude toward her. I know full well that Picasso treated her worse, I don’t deny it, but he was the Master, the God, the Great Genius. What are we? Nothing, nobody. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but that sulfurous nothingness keeps gaining ground and corroding everything it touches.
No, it’s not fair. We aren’t perfect. Neither is Dora. James and I, even less. And we don’t claim to be perfect friends.
Today, while we were sharing a strawberry ice cream, Dora told me about the time they moved near each other, Picasso to 7 Quai des Grands Augustins and Dora to 6 Rue de Savoie. Her face lit up with sadness as she described the places where she thought she was going to be happy. It’s strange that a woman like Dora would aspire to be simply happy with a man like Picasso, and when I mentioned it to her, she said she could be happy, occasionally, and not in a conventional way. It all depends on what you expect happiness to be. Over their ten years, she experienced perhaps twenty happy moments. She didn’t believe in the banal ideal of happiness, “being happy is too empty,” she insisted, adding a play on the words banalité and vanité. Banality, vanity. She stumbled, she stuttered. It was an evasive reply and an unbecoming attitude, in my view, of course, after I’d given her my sincere support. “Picasso was quite brave,” she says. Then she calls him just the opposite. She’s insane!
Plenty has been written about the circumstances that led Picasso to abandon his apartment on Rue La Boétie, though already it had long since been left uninhabited and uncleaned, almost in ruins, because of the painter’s instability and his refusal to keep living in a place where, according to him, he’d been so put down and misunderstood by Olga. That apartment reminded him of the excesses and socialite frivolities he was forced into by his Russian wife, according to what Dora told me. And yet the truth is that Picasso had also enjoyed those excesses, though it’s also the case that luxury and fatuity quickly bored him.
After the honeymoon phase of that marriage, he began to yearn for a place where he could live as what he really was: an artist! He tried to go back to his old bohemian times, the days of painter and poet friends, the nights of endless debates about art and painting.
Dora found the two addresses just about perfect for her lover’s new mood. During that period Picasso had broken with Jaume Sabartés; he was fed up (according to him) with his secretary’s scandalmongering, his nonstop blabbering about how Picasso mistreated women, about how he was stingy, about how he’d been awful, had cruelly mistreated the people who worshiped him. “The Master,” as Sabartés slavishly called him, ended up banishing him from his life for quite a long time, and Dora took advantage of this situation to seize control.
A series of coincidences at 7 Quai des Grands Augustins not only inflated Picasso’s ego but filled him with morbid elation and overweening pride. That was where the playwright and actor Jean-Louis Barrault, who later costarred with Arletty in Marcel Carné’s 1945 film Children of Paradise, found a space to rehearse his plays; it was also where the famous group Contre-Attaque debated Surrealism’s usefulness to the revolution, among other political ideas. And on the corner across the street, Louis XIII had been crowned king of France in 1610, at the age of nine, after his father, Henry IV, was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic.
At those Contre-Attaque meetings, in that very apartment, Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret, and Dora Maar got together with Georges Bataille. That was where they met the Cuban writer and ethnologist Lydia Cabrera, who didn’t appreciate the irresponsibility, or frivolity, of her openly Communist colleagues at all. Nor did Remedios Varo much care for mixing Surrealism with politics, much less for talk of ideology, even though she was anti-Fascist and anti-Franco and had been persecuted and arrested for it in France. Nor did Lydia Cabrera want anything to do with Fascism, much less Communism.
But the best omen of all, according to Picasso, was that the building had served Honoré de Balzac as the inspiration for writing his short story “The Unknown Masterpiece” in 1831. Curiously, this story had many points in common with what was going on in the artistic climate of the time when Picasso moved there. The tale anticipated a true revolution in art—not in society, as had been expected. It was believed that art would cause social uprisings through its incendiary political messages, which would incite the masses to take power (Socialist Realism, straight from the Soviet Union). Picasso despised any messages in art; then again, the greatest revolutionary in art was unquestionably Picasso himself.
The short story could already be considered visionary at the time, especially because in one of the apartments in the building that appears in the tale there lived none other than the one who profoundly changed the nature of art around the world, and who took one of Balzac’s recurring motifs and made it his own: that the mission of art should not be to copy nature but to express it or interpret it.
Later on, Picasso illustrated Balzac’s literary gem with a series of etchings. This was the kind of sidelong experience (as the Cuban writer and essayist José Lezama Lima might say) that sets a genius afire and that multiplies not the force of his ego, as I’ve previously expressed but rather his creative impulse, his mysteriously all-consuming force, whose purpose is exclusively to create.
I jot down the thoughts and reminiscences of Dora Maar in this brown notebook because they will be useful someday, perhaps to me, for writing about her, or for writing about this trip, this short but intense trip on which I’ve learned to listen to her and interpret her drastic mood swings.
I don’t know, I’m not very clear with respect to these notes. I couldn’t even aspire to a prestigious future; no one would bet on my becoming a famous writer. In my blue notebook I write about James and me, and sometimes about all three.
I’ve tried to puzzle out carefully: which of us will have benefited most from this trip? For Dora, neither James nor I mean much more than dust in the wind, we haven’t contributed anything essential to her that might help her age with any distinction due to our presence here, and we’ve left no impression on her, nothing enduring that’s come from our minds. The only one who could transform her was Picasso. We have no choice but to face this devastating reality.
James already knew her, and her ups and downs too. It’s possible that, having spent so much time with her, he’s now begun to lose interest. Nor will this trip with Dora add any astonishingly profound or exceptional meaning to his life. At this point I suspect he gets more bored by her than by anyone else. His feigned expression of interest is all too blatant, as is the bored look he puts on whenever he hears another of her anecdotes about the past, where her obsession has a name: Pablo Picasso. Nevertheless, he puts up with her, because James wouldn’t want to forsake his having been someone important in Dora’s life, in both their lives, Picasso’s, Dora’s.
No doubt about it, I’m the one who comes out ahead on this trip: I’ve gotten to know her a little better, I’ve been able to hold her in my arms. I had imagined a rigid, stern, arrogant woman, and I must admit I was wrong, I was unfair. Some people are born to have every unfairness in the world contribute to people’s perception of them.
Now I’m crazy about her, I’ll never forget her. How could I, when she’s seen something in me that nobody else ever has: my aspiration to become a serious man of letters? And she understood it.
James. A gondola ride from the heart of forgetfulness
The canal boat was waiting for him just where the gondolier had agreed to pick him up. He’d wanted to go for a stroll on his own and return by gondola to where he’d agreed to meet his friends, a restaurant near Teatro la Fenice—La Madonna, a refined place, exquisite, recommended by his Parisian friends.
Today he’d rather not have had to see Dora; he was rather t
ired of her company. He was suddenly beginning to regret having invited Picasso’s lover to come on their trip with them.
Though he considered her his one and only true friend, he couldn’t stand her when she set to harping on her relationship, immortalized in paintings, with Picasso’s imposing figure (not really with Picasso himself); and he hated it when she started detailing once again, right in front of Bernard, every torment the painter had put her through. He found her behavior presumptuous and tactless, the way she used the most plaintive and pitiful aspects of her relationship with the Great Genius to seduce Bernard. He’d have liked to forget her, erase her from his life.
He ruthlessly detested it when she set about describing, for example, how much work it had been for her to photograph Guernica. It was a story he already knew by heart, one he’d already told to Bernard himself. But his friend wanted to make a show of being extremely interested in her revelations (this lowered James’s opinion of Bernard), and then all of Venice’s beauty vanished from Bernard’s mind so he could bend his full attention to the storyteller and her miserable Picasso anecdotes.
The gondolier broke in upon his thoughts to ask if he already knew the city, in which case he could push on in a hurry, or if he wished instead to explore the canals at a leisurely pace while the boatman explained the history of the various palazzos.
“As you prefer. I’m in no hurry.”
“This is the palazzo where the famous author from the Republic of Venice, Giacomo Casanova, lived; his book, History of My Life, was a grandiloquent piece of literature,” the gondolier recited in proud and pompous tones. With a dismissive wave of his hand James called for a change of subject, as he was already familiar with the story.
James, somewhat put off by the gondolier’s prattle, let himself be swept away by the deeply touristic chatter; it kept his thoughts from flowing freely, but he couldn’t deny the musical charm of the Venetian accent.
So they disappeared into the strangely peaceful calm of the city’s watery byways. As the gondolier announced the palazzos to him one by one and pointed out, now more concisely at the passenger’s request, who had famously lived in which and who still lived where, James couldn’t help thinking back to scenes from the studio on Grands Augustins.
Picasso inevitably loved talking about the “Phoney War”—la drôle de guerre, as Parisians called it—and about bullfights as if they were works of art. Only with the bombing of Guernica on April 26, 1937, did he come to perceive the enormity of war’s true horrors. From then on he was conscious of the suffering and tragedy of the massacre.
Guernica was born not solely from his notorious “aesthetic narcissism,” as some of his other works had been, according to what Alicia Dujovne Ortiz tells us and what Picasso himself planned to recount in a book someday, but from the genuine, searing pain he perceived in letters from his mother, which told of a Spain sunk deep in death, and from Dora’s continual insistence that he must get involved, as a Spaniard, as a believer in the Republic, in the tragedy his country was struggling through.
Though he balked at the politically committed, twenty-four-hour activist Dora, it was her determination that forced him, in an act of resigned obedience, to take his proper stance as artist and as a defender of liberty.
The print Dream and Lie of Franco, completed long before, did not sufficiently represent for him the personal, intimate rage he felt over the thousands who had been cruelly murdered, and the hundreds left wounded and dying. “Wars end,” James remembered Picasso pointing out to him once, “but hostilities persist forever.”
James wished he could have been at Picasso’s side when he made the decision to paint Guernica. He felt a healthy envy of Dora over this. But a man befogged by the artist’s overpowering charm could never have seen and understood the immense effort such a colossal undertaking entailed, much less have motivated him to carry through with it. Fear paralyzes men, but motivates women.
Picasso invested a lot of physical and spiritual energy in that work. Dora did not only observe him, however; she also guided him. James told himself he wouldn’t have known how to do that. It would have been extraordinary to witness those moments when the Great Genius, Cher et Beau, spread out the huge sheets of paper on which he drew the rough sketches that would become portions of the grand canvas. Guernica was more than a painting; it was a torturous birth. James wouldn’t have been up to serving as its midwife.
Picasso had never allowed anyone to photograph him in the midst of such hard work before. However, he authorized Dora to proceed. He knew he wasn’t giving the assignment to just anyone, knew that she was, first of all, a great Surrealist artist and, secondly, the woman he loved. This is evident in the series of extraordinary photos Dora took of Guernica, especially in the one where Picasso, standing on a ladder, let himself be snapped by the lens of the artist who made Silence, one of the best works in Surrealism, where arches keenly, neatly cleave three bodies and a shadowy and seemingly superfluous half-light reinforces a mood of undulating chaos. At center, the rumpled body of a girl, her hands crossed above her pelvis; the head of a dead woman juts over the bottom edge of the photo; and at back, a body crawls toward a holy vertigo of hollow arcades.
James could bet that Dora had secretly infused Picasso’s Guernica with the mystery of her Silence. But what he most envied was the female face, so like Dora’s, near the gutted horse dying in agony, tongue sticking out, and the bull that represents reflection, contemplation, and perplexity. Dora was witness, accomplice, and protagonist. Guernica owes much to her presence. A presence that later would get on Picasso’s nerves, because he would realize that her photo series revealed, highlighted, the countless doubts and uncertainties that assailed him as he faced those eleven and a half by twenty-five and a half feet of canvas. And also because his most recognizable painting would forever enshrine the image of the weeping woman. That weeping woman is watched by another woman, kneeling and clutching a dead child, so similar to the third woman seen crawling on all fours in Dora’s earlier photo, in a masterful Guernica sequence.
James would have loved to have appeared in the great work, to have been immortalized as his friend had. But her grandeur was not for him, and he lacked her passion for inhabiting those expanses of white, black, and gray.
Dora is everywhere in Guernica. Her vibrant presence is explicit not only as the photographer who once captured Sylvia Bataille, weeping in the filming of The Crime of Monsieur Lange, where the two of them had coincided before they met. In Guernica, she is reflected in every woman’s face; she is all of them, even the horse, and she is there in every inch of the painting, haunted by hungry ghosts, weeping uncontrollably.
For James, Guernica was the most important art work of the twentieth century.
A painting never meant for Dora, not even in Picasso’s wildest lies and promises. Not for her, not for anyone. Not even when he promised Marie-Thérèse that the canvas he was painting was for her and her child, that it would be dedicated to Maya and her mother.
Maya’s mother, the Vestal Mother, however, didn’t understand the importance of that promise, wasn’t aware of the significance of the painting, which had cost Dora such efforts to bring into existence.
“You can’t paint suns. Your suns turn out awful.” Dora humiliated Picasso when she studied the sun in Guernica, easy to do in the series of photos she’d taken.
The sun was transformed into an eye, and inside the eye, a light bulb. She’d given him the idea. That was her first step toward perdition. It was unforgiveable for someone who was supposed to keep her mouth shut, a silent observer in the background, to rob him, if only for a few seconds, of his role as the great creator. That was all it took for him never to forgive her. A genius would rather give away a work of art than have to thank someone forever for giving him an idea.
James knew how much his friend Dora had suffered when Picasso broke with her, but he recognized that what he considered an artist’s smug gesture on her part had killed off a wonderful relatio
nship, which ended up benefiting James himself.
“Poor fool!” he blurted. “She dug her own grave. Her pretentions and quarreling drove him away. She should have been satisfied with what she’d been given, should have been the woman who inspired, not the one who interrupted the divine trances of the Great Genius. Dora estranged us both, herself and me, from Picasso. Estranged me, because, how could I keep loving Picasso if he no longer loved her, but only the terrifying idealization he had invented of her?”
Nothing as indelible as the illusion of silence in mirrors. Venice, 2008
We were having breakfast when it occurred to me to bring up my project of writing a novel about three women Surrealists: first, Dora Maar; second, Remedios Varo.…
“And the third?” asked Roberto García York.
“A Cuban woman who actually was a Surrealist without knowing it. El Monte is a great piece of Surrealist writing. I’m talking about Lydia Cabrera.”
He nodded as he lifted a bite of ham impaled on a silver fork to his mouth.
“You haven’t considered Leonora Carrington? Or Leonor Fini? Both are tremendous, wonderful, unique, and highly creative in several fields of art. Leonor Fini in the theater—”
“Yes, of course, but what I find interesting about these three women isn’t just that they were part of the Surrealist movement, and that they contributed to it, and that their paintings were Surrealist even after they renounced it, or that they weren’t even aware they were Surrealists. What I hope to do is to recount small moments in their lives—brief but intense, profound, incidents.”
Roberto García York sat in thought, as if he had his doubts. After a short while he acknowledged that, of all the women mentioned, he preferred Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo; he had known them both, and also Leonor Fini. His own work, he added, was strongly influenced by those artists. But he couldn’t see any special mystery about Dora Maar. I understand his position: Picasso had ultimately overshadowed the brilliance of her work.
