Dora Maar: how Picasso`s weeping woman had the last laugh
(The Guardian Culture News)

History remembers her as Picasso´s muse but Maar was an unflinching artist who infiltrated the surrealists´ boys club - and helped paint Guernica When Dora Maar died on 16 July 1997 at the age of 89, few people seemed to notice. It took the French newspaper Le Monde - in her home country - 10 days to publish anything. And when journalists did cotton on, they didn´t seem to think Maar was the story. The New York Times called her `a muse of Picasso` and the `principal model for many of his so-called weeping women portraits in the late 30s and early 40s`. The Independent, while admitting that Maar had been an artist in her own right, suggested that she would nonetheless be `remembered as the most poignant of Pablo Picasso´s mistresses`.Forget that she´d also been a major surrealist photographer, one of the few women in that circle, and that she was still painting into her 80s. For critics, she was Picasso´s Weeping Woman - the eternally spurned mistress and muse. Maar herself bitterly resented being regarded as a sort of art-world Miss Havisham, the subject of someone else´s picture. `All [Picasso´s] portraits of me are lies,` she once said. `Not one is Dora Maar.` Continue reading...