Picasso's most famous muse, Dora Maar, was young, beautiful, intelligent, sensual, self-confident, and vulnerable. Their intoxicating yet destructive relationship pushed Picasso to new emotional and artistic extremes. In 1935, Picasso met the 25-year-younger artist and photographer Dora Maar at the Café des Deux Magots in Paris, and she soon became his lover. Officially, Picasso was still married to Olga at this point, and his previous lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, gave birth to their daughter Maya the same year. But the fateful affair that Picasso embarked upon with Dora Maar was to go down in art history as one of the most significant episodes of Modernism. The intensity and pain of this relationship, which for many years was an emotionally charged love triangle involving Picasso, Dora Maar, and Marie-Thérèse Walter, brought forth works of outstanding artistic significance. It was during this period that his most compelling creations were born: the female figures and portraits inspired by Dora Maar.
From the outset, it was the female nude and human physiognomy that captivated Picasso, and he soon made them his artistic trademark by dissecting them in a cubist manner. However, during his years with Dora Maar, which coincided with the bitter years of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, Picasso not only took the Cubist dissection of typical of previous years to extremes, but also achieved an emotional depth in his portrayal of the human physiognomy that remains unmatched to this day. It was not until the second half of the century that artists such as Francis Bacon and Maria Lassnig finally found ways to continue the psychological deformation of the human form in their art.
Besides the deep emotional quality that Picasso expresses in portraits of Dora Maar that transcend the human form, Picasso's famous anti-fascist war painting “Guernica” (1937, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid) is also worth mentioning in this context. Equally inspired by Dora Maar, it is a captivating account of the human experience of pain and suffering on canvas. The contorted faces of the screaming mother with her dead child, the burning and the fleeing woman, continue to haunt us to this day. Picasso's famous series of portraits of the weeping woman, “La femme qui pleure,” based on the model Dora Maar, was also created in direct connection with “Guernica.” The most famous versions of these paintings are now in the collections of the Tate Modern in London and the Beyeler Collection in Riehen/Basel. The drypoint etching with the same motif and title, which Picasso also executed with technical perfection in 1937, is now considered one of the artist's most important individual prints, alongside the present work “La femme au tambourin.” It is not surprising that copies of these two outstanding creations are part of collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel.
While Picasso depicts Dora Maar as a desperately weeping woman in his alarming portrait “La femme qui pleure” (The Weeping Woman), as he saw his sensitive lover who had been painfully disappointed by him many times, he shows us Dora Maar in all her sensuality and eroticism in “La femme au tambourin” (The Woman with the Tambourine). She is a bacchante or maenad, a woman who displays her erotic charms openly, who, according to ancient mythology, is a dancing and music-making companion at a feast centered around Bacchus, the God of festivity and ecstasy. Besides Pan and the Minotaur, it is Bacchus, among others, whom the love-addicted artist found to be his ancient alter ego, which is why we become intimate witnesses to the intoxicating and captivating love dance between Picasso and Dora Maar in “La femme au tambourin.” It is the big eyes and lips, the cascading hair, the breasts, and the round buttocks that Picasso masterfully depicts against the deep black aquatint background. The motif of movement is formally reminiscent of Umberto Boccioni's famous futuristic bronze “Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio” (1913, Museum of Modern Art, New York). “La femme au tambourin” is a striking example of Picasso’s avant-garde portrayal of femininity and eroticism. He does not show us the suffering lover, as Dora Maar was to go down in art history, but rather the captivating, self-confident, rapturous seductress. [JS]