Wearable Art

Pablo Picasso: Tête de femme (Dora Maar), 1941

I love Picasso’s paintings of the gloomy, gorgeous, crazy photographer Dora Maar, who was his lover for almost nine years. Picasso painted her frequently in tears—partly because she was always crying, but also partly because their relationship, which coincided with the Spanish Civil War and World War II, was so mired in suffering and violence. Picasso biographer John Richardson wrote, “After World War II broke out, Picasso came to portray Dora more and more frequently as a sacrificial victim, a tearful symbol of his own pain and grief at the horrors of tyranny and war” (via museumuesum). He also frequently depicted her wearing hats. Here’s an excerpt from Christie’s write-up about this painting, referring to Dora’s chapeau.

Dora’s hat by now had become a regular feature in Picasso’s depictions of her, functioning as a symbolic extension of her inner angst. Brigitte Léal has called the hat Dora’s “most provocative emblem… In its preciousness and fetishistic vocation, the feminine hat was, like the glove, an erotic accessory highly prized by the Surrealists. Thus Paul Eluard [declared] ‘A head must dare to wear a crown.’ A crown of daffodils, an urchin’s beret, or a cool straw hat for Marie-Thérèse, painted like a Manet; nets, veils and the great wings of a voracious insect for Dora: even their respective ornaments point to the glaring differences in the temperament between the two women” (in Picasso and Portraiture, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, pp. 387, 389 and 392). Dora’s hats acquired an especially belligerent aspect during the early months of the war: they sometimes resemble the silhouettes of warships seen on the horizon, or as seen here, a warplane’s propeller, or the tail fins of a plunging high-explosive bomb.

(via sfmoma)