How Pablo Picasso’s mistress and muse, Dora Maar, influenced art history

A few years ago, a French journalist leafed through an old Hermes address book that her husband bought on eBay. In alphabetical order, there were names and addresses of France’s most important thinkers and artists. They were stars of the early 20th Century art world.

Brigitte Benkemoun discovered the book belonged to a woman famous for being Pablo Picasso’s mistress and muse for his famous “weeping woman” painting. The woman was Dora Maar.

Entry by entry, author Brigitte Benkemoun reconstructs Dora Maar’s Parisian social life through just 20 address pages, scribbled in brown ink. Her book is called “Finding Dora Maar: An Artist, an Address Book, a Life.”

“She was an artist. She was a painter. And people forget that because she's so important in the history of art,” says Benkemoun.

Read an excerpt of Chapter 2:

Achille de Ménerbes

Forget Bergerac! Forget the sellers and auctioneers! Since I had at my disposal exhibit A, I could subject this piece of evidence to a kind of interrogation: decode it line by line and page by page, make a list of the known friends of the unknown genius, search the others on the internet. I would end up solving the mystery.

This excerpt is from the new publication “Finding Dora Maar: An Artist, an Address Book, a Life” by Brigitte Benkemoun and translated by Jody Gladding © 2020 J. Paul Getty Trust.