Dora Maar au Chat

Dora Maar au Chat
Artist	Pablo Picasso
Year	1941
Medium	Oil on canvas
Movement	Cubism
Dimensions	128.3 cm × 95.3 cm (50.5 in × 37.5 in)
Location	Private collection

Dora Maar au Chat (English: Dora Maar with Cat) is an oil on canvas painting by Pablo Picasso. It was painted in 1941 and depicts Dora Maar, (original name Henriette Theodora Markovitch) the artist's lover, seated on a chair with a small cat perched on her shoulders. The painting is listed as one of the most expensive paintings, after achieving a price of $95 million at Sotheby's on 3 May 2006. It is currently the sixth highest selling painting by Picasso.

Background

The canvas was one of many portraits of Dora Maar painted by Pablo Picasso over their nearly decade-long relationship. Picasso fell in love at the age of 55 with the 29-year-old Maar and the couple soon began living together. This painting was made during the year 1941, when the Nazis were occupying France.

Description

Dora Maar au Chat presents the artist's most mysterious and challenging mistress regally posed three-quarter length in a large wooden chair with a small black cat perched behind her in both an amusing and menacing attitude. The faceted planes of her body and richly layered surface of brushstrokes impart a monumental and sculptural quality to this portrait. The painting is also remarkable for its brilliance of colour and the complex and dense patterning of the model's dress. The powerful figure is set in a dramatic, yet simple setting composed of a vertiginously inclined plane of wooden floorboards and shallow interior space that is arranged in a manner reminiscent of Picasso's earliest manipulations of space in a cubist manner.

Dora Maar au Chat is one of Picasso's most valued depictions of his lover and artistic companion. Their partnership had been one of intellectual exchange and intense passion—Dora was an artist, spoke Picasso's native Spanish, and shared his political concerns. She even assisted with the execution of the monumental Guernica and produced the only photo-documentary of the work in progress. She was an intellectual force – a characteristic that both stimulated and challenged Picasso and her influence on him resulted in some of his most powerful and daring portraits of his 75-year career. Among the best of them are the oils completed during the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Picasso's art resonated with the drama and emotional upheaval of the era and which Dora came to personify. The luminous Dora Maar au Chat was painted in 1941, at the beginning of the Second World War in France.

Maar was one of the most influential figures in Picasso's life during their relationship and she also became his primary model. By the time he painted the present picture he had incorporated Dora Maar's image into countless versions of this motif. During the occupation of Paris by the Nazis, and as tension mounted in their relationship, the artist would express his frustration by furiously abstracting her image, often portraying her in tears. While the present portrait might seem a departure from Picasso's more hostile depictions of this model, it may be one of his most brilliant and biting provocations of his Weeping Woman. Picasso once likened Maar's allure and temperament to that of an “Afghan cat”, and the cat in this picture is laden with significance. In the history of art, the pairing of cats and women was an allusion to feminine wiles and sexual aggression, as exemplified in Manet’s notorious Olympia. The artist has paid particular attention to the sharp, talon-like nails on the long fingers of his model. In life Maar's well-manicured hands were one of her most beautiful and distinctive features, and here they have taken on another, more violent characteristic.

In addition to being a rare, three-quarter length portrait of Dora Maar, the present work is also a generous and painterly composition with an extraordinary attention to detail. The artist used an extraordinarily vibrant palette in his rendering of the angles of the chair and the patterning of Maar's dress. The most embellished and symbolic element of the sitter's wardrobe in this picture is her hat, Maar's most famous accessory and signifier of her involvement in the Surrealist movement. Ceremoniously placed atop her head like a crown, it is festooned with colourful plumes and outlined with a band of vibrant red. Larger than life, an impression enhanced by her vibrant body that cannot be confined by the boundaries of the chair, Maar looms in this picture like a pagan goddess seated on her throne.

Significance and legacy

Charles Moffett, Vice Chairman of Sotheby’s, remarked on the painting's significance.

Dora Maar with Cat is unquestionably one of Picasso's most extraordinary portrayals of the woman who for nearly a decade was his muse, model, and lover. An accomplished photographer who was close to key members of the Surrealist circle, Maar appealed deeply to Picasso because of her arresting and wild beauty, engaging intellect, and commitment as an artist. As Brigitte Léal has observed with regard to the portraits of Dora Maar that Picasso painted in the early 1940s, ‘...they embody the height of modern beauty as [André] Breton envisioned it, based on the principle of vital disorder, which the figure of Dora Maar, in her extreme mutability, her real, spiritual restlessness, will forever incarnate’.

David Norman, a Chairman of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art Department Worldwide, also summarised the importance of the painting.

Dora Maar Au Chat presents the artist’s most mysterious and challenging mistress regally posed three-quarter length in a large wooden chair with a small black cat perched behind her in both an amusing and menacing attitude. The faceted planes of her body and richly layered surface of brushstrokes impart a monumental and sculptural quality to this dazzling portrait. The painting is also remarkable for its brilliance of color and the complex and dense patterning of the model’s dress. The powerful figure is set in a dramatic, yet simple setting composed of a vertiginously inclined plane of wooden floorboards and shallow interior space that is arranged in a manner reminiscent of Picasso’s earliest manipulations of space in a Cubist manner.

Provenance

In the 1940s, the painting was obtained by Chicago collectors Leigh and Mary Block. They sold the painting in 1963. After that, the painting was never seen in public until the 21st century.

During 2005 and 2006, Dora Maar au Chat, then owned by the Gidwitz family of Chicago, was shown worldwide as part of Sotheby's exhibitions in London, Hong Kong and New York. It came up for sale in an auction held at Sotheby's on 3 May 2006 in New York, making it the second-highest price ever paid for a painting at auction at the time. An anonymous Russian bidder who was present at the auction won the work with a final bid of $95,216,000, well exceeding the pre-auction estimate of $50 million. The identity of the bidder, who also purchased an 1883 Monet seascape and a 1978 Chagall, was a topic of much speculation. The winning buyer is listed as Georgian businessman and billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili.

See also

• List of most expensive paintings

External links

• Sotheby's: About the painting and its features
• Sotheby's: Full story of the auction on May 3, 2006, New York