Femme à la résille Print

Combining aspects of Synthetic Cubism with biomorphic Surrealist forms, this exuberant portrait of acclaimed Surrealist photographer and painter Dora Maar embodies a radical inventiveness for which her photography was renowned. Pablo Picasso had met Maar in 1935, just several months after his then-lover Marie-Thérèse Walter had given birth to their daughter. In the following years, Picasso alternated back and forth between the two women – both romantically and in paint. Just one month after Femme à la résille [Woman in a Hairnet], 1938 was painted, Picasso portrayed Marie-Thérèse in the exact same pose. 

Femme à la résille [Woman in a Hairnet] comes from a critical moment in Picasso’s career. The year before, he had completed the monumental anti-war mural Guernica in response to the Spanish Civil War, the painting of which Maar, a left-wing activist, photographed. That same year, she would be immortalised in a series of 36 Weeping Woman paintings made as a postscript to Guernica. While for Picasso Maar ‘was always a weeping woman’, she bitterly resented this characterisation, vehemently asserting: ‘All [Picasso’s] portraits of me are lies. Not one is Dora Maar.’

Femme à la résille [Woman in a Hairnet] 1938 

18.5 x 15.3cm (image only), 20cm x 16.6cm (with white border) 
27.8 x 35.2 x 0.1cm (including white matting)
made in New Zealand

Unframed prints can be shipped both nationally and internationally, framed prints are only available to be shipped within Aotearoa, New Zealand.