FINDING DORA MAAR: An Artist, an Address Book, a Life

FINDING DORA MAAR: An Artist, an Address Book, a Life
BRIGITTE BENKEMOUN (tr. Jody Gladding)
Getty Publications
$24.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Merging biography, memoir, and cultural history, this compelling book, a bestseller in France, traces the life of Dora Maar through a serendipitous encounter with the artist’s address book.

In search of a replacement for his lost Hermès agenda, Brigitte Benkemoun’s husband buys a vintage diary on eBay. When it arrives, she opens it and finds inside private notes dating back to 1951—twenty pages of phone numbers and addresses for Balthus, Brassaï, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard, Leonor Fini, Jacqueline Lamba, and other artistic luminaries of the European avant-garde.

After realizing that the address book belonged to Dora Maar—Picasso’s famous “Weeping Woman” and a brilliant artist in her own right—Benkemoun embarks on a two-year voyage of discovery to learn more about this provocative, passionate, and enigmatic woman, and the role that each of these figures played in her life.

Longlisted for the prestigious literary award Prix Renaudot, Finding Dora Maar is a fascinating and breathtaking portrait of the artist.

This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A very interesting look at the inspiration of one very curious person to dig into the life of a largely forgotten figure from the fringes of art history. The discovery of the address book, the many pathways the author's curiosity led her down, the wonderfully creative way she was able to overcome spaces left in the record of the time...all very good. I enjoyed that aspect of the book.

I actively despise Dora Maar, homophobe and antisemite.

I don't want to know more about her, and am sorry that I now know what I do. If I could dig her up and kill her again, I would. The author doesn't frame her unhappiness with the discoveries she makes about the woman in such outraged terms because, one assumes in the absence of explicit statements on the subject, she isn't gay or Jewish. As a product of the modern world she shares none of Maar's unpleasant ideology, and makes it quite clear this is the case.

What her project did was recenter attention on Dora Maar, artist, person, woman; up to now her one piece of fame was as Picasso's mistress and muse, "The Weeping Woman" of Picasso's iconic painting:

...whose mental health was terribly damaged by him during their relationship. So, in other words, her only existence even in her mind's functioning was centered on the man Picasso. No room for Maar the suffering person. No blame attached to her "friends" populating this address book for essentialling dropping her as she declined. After all, her claim to their attention waned when her connection to Picasso receded into memory. Of course it would.

Given Maar's own merits as an artist, the decline in her circle of friends wasn't as abrupt as it would've been had she not been socially acceptable before her troubles manifested themselves. The author is much more direct about blaming Maar's unpleasant personal beliefs on others than about blaming those others for exacerbating her depression by isolating her. They had scads of reasons to do so, given her unpleasantly judgmental and deeply dyed-in-the-wool fascist ideas and ideology...and no, Author Benkemoun, trying to explain that away with her desire to provoke and satirize the leftists she knew via Picasso isn't an excuse. It's not even much of an explanation. That level of indifference she displayed to the Final Solution and her framing of it as a threat to her personally as someone of Croatian ancestry smacks more of sociopathy than of some kind of artifact of depression, as is suggested in here.

What about this truly dreadful human being made you care for her so deeply, I kept asking Author Benkemoun as the pages turned. What resonated in you to this, to my eyes, justly forgotten and uncelebrated hateful person? Her femaleness? I think she, and her lover Picasso, both deserve desuetude. That it was only her lot is unjust. But let's try to use the weapons of attention to attack Picasso not re-evaluate Maar. Put him, his sexism, his abusive narcissism in the bin with her and let's move on.