Treger’s latest novel concerns the life, or more accurately the love, of Dora Maar – a photographer and painter who lived in Paris for most of her life and most notably, during the German occupation in WWII. Born Henrietta Theodora Markovitch in 1907, she was known as a surrealist photographer exhibiting alongside Dali and other notable surrealists. She used her photographic art to better represent life through links with ideas, politics and philosophy rather than slavishly photographing what was naturally there. She was exhibited in the Surrealist Exposition in Paris and the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936. In the same year she was exhibited at MOMA in NYC. He first encountered Picasso while taking photos at a film set in 1935, but they were not introduced until a few days later when Paul Elduard introduced them at Cafe des Deux Magots. They met in quite a dramatic way that showed her intent to catch his eye. She sat alone and using a pen knife she drove the blade between her splayed fingers and where she missed blood stained the gloves she wore. The fact that Picasso kept these gloves and packed them away with his treasured mementoes is a metaphor for their entire relationship – he fed from her emotions.
The author allows Dora to tell her own story and we are inside her mind at all times. We could say this is only her viewpoint of their relationship, but in a world where she is most known through her relationship with a man instead of her own work, Treger is simply redressing the balance. Also you’d have to be utterly blind to think there’s any other way of looking at his treatment of her and the other women he was involved with. But the nine years they were together, she was subjected to mental and psychological abuse. She was underestimated as an influence on his work, particularly Guernica and his politics. I feel on reading the book that he was drawn to what he saw as her masochism and drew on the pain he caused her both for his personal satisfaction and his art. He comes across as a narcissist; constantly told he was a genius he believes everything revolves around his needs and his freedom to work. This is seen in The Weeping Woman series of paintings where she’s depicted as a woman who is constantly tortured and distressed.
We can see how their affair had a distinct honeymoon period. The mistake she made was thinking this would be a template for the rest of their affair. She knew he had a wife, Olga, who’d had a nervous breakdown. There was also Marie Therese, who was his mistress and had his son Paulo. It seems Picasso never turned down an offer, having liaisons with many of their friends and group sexual experiences when they were on holiday in the South of France. These encounters caused Dora extreme emotional distress and being in her head was a painful experience. I desperately wanted Dora to walk away, but she wasnt being true to herself in accepting her behaviour. It felt like their relationship moved in a toxic pattern of infidelity, followed by distress and recrimination. The more distressed she became, Picasso would withdraw, telling her theyd made a bargain, that she was free to leave and that her distress was preventing him from working. Consequently we can see her feelings discounted. He gaslights her by saying she doesn’t have to feel the way she does; her feelings were always the problem, never his behaviour. In one scene in the book Dora suspects her mother is unwell after a dropped phone call but it’s after curfew during the German occupation an they can’t leave the house. Although Dora has paper saying she’s Catholic and Aryan, they won’t save her if she’s found out in the middle of the night. I found Picasso terribly cold towards her when they find her mother dead the next day, he doesn’t touch her and seemed more fascinated rigor mortis and the unearthly sheen of her skin, than comforting Dora. There were times when I felt he was doing things to keep Dora in her place, but there were other times when he seemed genuinely unmoved. It was as if once he looked at something with his artist’s eye it became an object.
It was no surprise when Dora’s mental health began to decline and being in that space with her felt suffocating and scary. I loved the way the author had missing sections in the text to signify time Dora has lost and where others have to step in. Treger represents Dora’s declining mental health as a direct product of Picasso’s actions. It’s as if he slowly takes her apart until her mind resembles one of his portraits, distorted and unnatural. Dora is a square trying to fit into a round hole. She is in love with Picasso and craves a life with him based on friendship, passion and fidelity. Picasso wants to have everything Dora is offering, but without the fidelity. He can’t understand why she is unhappy at his visits to Marie Therese, because when he’s with Dora he is wholly with her. His assertion that they should both be free almost sounds plausible until you realise that he holds all the power: he sees Dora when it suits him not her; he reserves the right to sleep with her friends even when she’s there; he also gets to decide when she should return to her apartment and let him work. I almost wanted him to have a taste of his own medicine. I wanted Dora to turn him away when she’s working or sleep with one of her male friends while they were on holiday, but she doesn’t get to dictate in the same way. That’s when you realise that his call for freedom in their relationship, means his freedom. I felt sad for Dora, possibly influenced by some of my own experiences. She seemed like a smaller woman at the end with none of her original vitality and flamboyance. I’m so glad to know that her art lives on and is still exhibited as part of the surrealist canon.
Out now from Bloomsbury Publishing
For more on Dora Maar’s work and legacy…
Meet the Author
Louisa Treger, a classical violinist, studied at the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and worked as a freelance orchestral player and teacher.
She subsequently turned to literature, earning a Ph.D. in English at University College London, where she focused on early-twentieth-century women’s writing and was awarded the West Scholarship ‘for distinguished work in the study of English Language and Literature.’
Louisa’s first novel, The Lodger, was published in 2014, and her second novel, The Dragon Lady, was published by Bloomsbury in 2019. She lives in London.
Find out more about Louisa at louisatreger.com or https://www.facebook.com/louisatregerwriter or @louisatreger
With grateful thanks to Louise Treger for my early copy of this novel.
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