The Paris Muse
Artist’s muse: a sublime devotee, one could presuppose. For controversial French creative Dora Maar, Pablo Picasso’s lover in the perspective-changing art world of the 1930s and 40s, it perhaps exceeded even this. It was also the path that led Dora to mental collapse.
In The Paris Muse, Louisa Treger’s fictionalised Dora charts the passion and anguish of her trail-blazing life and her insistence on shaping her unique identity as an artist and a woman honestly and fearlessly. The author achieves a sensitive, somewhat cautious handling of difficult material, from the affection-starved childhood that permeates a dark early relationship to the repressed guilt and neediness that keep Dora ensnared by her obsessive worship of the explosive genius who would, temporarily, drain her very lifeforce. At times deeply moving, unsettling in its grim portrayal of staggering emotional carnage, the novel could be interpreted as poignantly allegorical.
A gifted surrealist photographer, the youthful Dora, high on adoration, absinthe and the magnetism of the soul spilling from Pablo’s black eyes, conducted a defiantly subversive theatrical display at his local restaurant, with seduction her aim. She could not have known that her choice would bring purgatory along with ecstasy. In France’s most romantic city, as the two creators spin their cocoon in chiaroscuro, each one blending light – and sometimes more transgressive energy – in their expression, she is oblivious that for Pablo, there will forever be other women.
Photographically chronicling his agonised statement painting Guernica, as the city perishes, Dora grieves when Pablo’s despair-driven peccadilloes follow. War, family tragedy… Dread engulfs the reader as new wounds accumulate, excoriatingly, on top of old, the breakdown finally crashing over an exhausted woman with monumental, heart-lurching, inevitability.
But a sobbing ghost, pinned to canvas? Never. Crucified and living, Dora Maar would yet authentically paint her way to peace.
