Painted on June 9, 1939, Buste de femme au chapeau is an elegant and enigmatic portrait of Pablo Picasso’s lover and muse Dora Maar. Renowned for her striking beauty and intense personality, Maar's presence in Picasso's life, from their first meeting in 1935 to the dissolution of their relationship around 1945, had a deep and far-reaching impact on both the artist and his work. Her visage became a recurring motif in his work, with each seated portrait exploring varied psychological nuances through distortions and abstractions. Buste de femme au chapeau remained in Picasso’s personal collection throughout his life, one of the so-called ‘Picasso’s Picassos’ first recorded by David Douglas Duncan in 1961. Following the artist’s death in 1973, the portrait passed into the esteemed collection of the Galerie Beyeler, where it resided alongside other noteworthy paintings of the period, including other works from the Femmes au chapeau series. Featuring the bold, serpentine line of her hair offset by the jaunty angles of the titular hat, this work incorporates key elements of Picasso’s paintings of Maar, including his distinctive rendering of her eyes, strong line of her nose, and radical combinations of frontal and profile views that recall his earlier Cubistic investigations into the simultaneous representation of multiple perspectives on a single picture plane.

‘‘The innumerable, very different portraits that Picasso did of [Maar] remain among the finest achievements of his art, at a time when he was engaged in a sort of third path, verging on Surrealist representation while rejecting strict representation and, naturally, abstraction.’’
—Brigitte Léal

 

Confidently balancing precise geometric angularity with a more open, sensual voluptuousness, Buste de femme au chapeau is a complex and captivating portrait of Maar, the innovative Surrealist photographer who became Pablo Picasso’s primary muse and paramour during the turbulent years surrounding the Second World War. With her dramatic good looks and quick-witted intelligence, Maar had immediately captured Picasso’s attention after their first meeting towards the end of 1935. The new, novel challenge of her features, combined with his own intensifying feelings around the Spanish Civil War, ushered in profound shifts in the older artist’s painterly style that are now recognized as representing one of the most radical and significantly productive periods of his career.

 

Painted in 1939, as Europe teetered on the cusp of war once again, Buste de femme au chapeau belongs to this intensely creative period, with Picasso turning increasingly to the objects and faces that he shared his immediate surroundings with. Although throughout these years the focus of his painterly attentions oscillated between Maar and his other major muse and mistress of the decade, Marie-Thérèse Walter, by the June of 1939 he was nearly completely absorbed by the beguiling Maar. With almost unmatched energy and focus, he worked and reworked her distinctive features, completing over fifteen portraits of his lover in this month alone.

 

This particular work was painted on the 9^th of June, making it the second of a pair of portraits painted that day, the other being Buste de femme (Dora Maar), in the Catherine Hutin-Blay Collection, Paris, which he had executed that morning. In the first painting, Picasso’s vision of Maar reflected “hair-trigger madness in the eyes” and “a blood-red birthmark on her throat,” while by afternoon “her eyes had narrowed to feline, icy slits through which she unblinkingly followed the viewer.”^I Her face thus became the canvas upon which he projected his own emotional turbulence, reflecting the progressive destruction of everything dear to him in the face of looming disaster. As Douglas Duncan keenly observed in 1961, “Of course, not one of these pictures was actually a portrait but [Picasso’s] prophecy of a ruined world.”ⁱⁱ

 

With her darker coloring, angular features, and forceful personality, Maar appeared the perfect opposite of the blonde and docile Walter. Unlike Marie-Thérèse who rarely involved herself with Picasso’s avant-garde circuit, the politically engaged Maar was already known by many of Picasso’s set; a friend of poets and painters, she was of course also a widely respected artist in her own right. A fluent Spanish speaker and committed anti-fascist, Maar was also radically left-wing, sharing Picasso’s eager anticipation of news from Spain, and his frustration and despair at the rising tide of fascism and violence tearing apart his home country.

‘‘Vivacious, provocative, witty conversationalist—in Spanish as well as French—effervescent as plums in champagne, Dora Maar swirled into Picasso’s life [. . .] a name that would be linked always thereafter with his in art.’’
—David Douglas Duncan 

The Weeping Woman

 

Intensely fascinated by Maar, her face with its notably strong profile framed by a cascade of dark hair would become the defining motif of Picasso’s work in the late 1930s and early 1940s, combining fashionable Parisian glamor with the fractured contortion of her features most expressively realized in the many studies of weeping women that preoccupied the artist for most of 1937. Returning to the motif of the human head that had first absorbed him a decade earlier in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Picasso used these intimate studies as a means of exploring, “with the concentration and intimacy of the close-up”, a complex range of emotions depicted in the larger scale and more narrative-driven works of the period.ⁱⁱⁱ Indeed, emotions were running high on both personal and political fronts, the turbulence caused by the artist’s vacillation between Maar and Walter dovetailing with the anguish and pain caused by the devastation of civil war in Spain.

 

Overlapping with the execution of Picasso’s hugely ambitious Guernica—the evolution of which Maar was deeply involved in and recorded through a series of intimate photographs—the motif of the weeping woman, her face shattered in agonized cries, allowed Picasso to concentrate the experience of grief into a timeless and uniquely expressive image that has become absolutely intertwined with its historical moment in a way that few paintings achieve.

 

By the summer of 1939, the political landscape had shifted once again. Following the devastating capture of the artist’s hometown of Barcelona by Franco’s troops in the January, Republican forces were brutally suppressed and silenced. By March, the shadow of fascism loomed even larger over Europe as Hitler broke the Munich Pact, invading and annexing Czechoslovakia. Conflating personal and political uncertainty, Picasso used Maar to work through the collective emotional tumult that defined the era. When Duncan first catalogued the unseen paintings from this period some decades later, he was struck immediately by the way in which “the progressive destruction of everything dear was told in the face of his model […] gowned in the sombre greys and black of a mourning duchess of Spain.”^iv

 

However, although tinged with anxiety and personal trials, 1939 also brought forth many triumphs for the artist, notably preparation for a major traveling retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the staggering success of what would prove to be his last exhibition with the dealer Paul Rosenberg. Presenting a group of thirty-three still lifes painted between 1936 and 1938, the exhibition emphasized the beginnings of a stylistic shift in the artist’s practice, one that would earn Picasso his first Time magazine cover, featuring a portrait of him by none other than Maar. In reference to this exhibition, Picasso’s loyal secretary Jaime Sabartés astutely described it as presenting a “narrative of the intimate life of the man in terms of familiar objects, of what he ate and drank, and loved to keep before his eyes and could not part with.”^v It is upon these foundations that the intimate Femme au chapeau series is built, the predominance of familiar objects from the earlier years of the 1930s giving way to more intensely personal studies of Maar, characterized by combined frontal and profile views of his model and the exaggerated shape of the stylish hats that this series records.

 

‘‘Among the objects tangled in the web of life, the female hat is one of those that require the most insight, the most audacity. A head must wear a crown.’’
—Paul Éluard

In its palette of dominant purple and deeper blue tones and in the stylized and organic rendering of Maar’s hat, Buste de femme au chapeau recalls Duncan’s memorable description of Maar as “effervescent as plums in champagne”, a force of nature who “swirled into Picasso’s life” and pushed the painter into new, revolutionary territory.^[vi] The depiction of the “chapeau” in this instance extends beyond mere aesthetic appeal; it serves as a complex nod to Picasso's intimate and professional relationship with Maar. Herself a Surrealist artist, Maar famously donned a hat in her 1936-1937 photomontage, Double Portrait with Hat, where she sandwiched two negatives of the same image together to create an image where the hat of the woman disintegrates into double vision. In the present painting, the arabesque quality of the hat’s design—fluid, dynamic, and organic— further evoke James Duncan's description of Maar. Through this interplay of form and metaphor, the hat transcends its role as part of the attire, becoming a complex symbol of Maar's artistic and emotional entanglement with Picasso, weaving together personal narrative and artistic innovation in a portrait rich with historical and emotional depth.

 

ⁱ David Douglas Duncan, Picasso’s Picassos: The Treasures of La Californie, London, 1961, p. 169.

ⁱⁱ  Ibid.

ⁱⁱⁱ Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p. 591.

^ivDavid Douglas Duncan, Picasso’s Picassos: The Treasures of La Californie, London, 1961, p. 165.

^vJaime Sabartés, quoted in John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Minotaur Years, 1933–1943, New York, 2021, p. 186.

^vi David Douglas Duncan, Picasso’s Picassos: The Treasures of La Californie, London, 1961, p. 127.