"She was to be Picasso's lover and muse for seven years. In that time she photographed him at work and play, in the studio and on the beach, alone or with friends such as Man Ray, Andre Breton, Jacqueline Lamba and Paul Eluard. In early 1957 she created a unique photographic record of the painting of Guernica, Picasso's searing protest against the carnage of the Spanish Civil War. Dora's own features were immortalized in the lamp-bearing woman in Guernica and in the harrowing distortions of the Weeping Woman, the image in which Picasso achieved his most acute expression of the public and private anguish of those years.".

Merging biography, memoir, and cultural history, this compelling book, a bestseller in France, traces the life of Dora Maar (1907–1997) 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. “Beautifully written and fascinating.”—Paris Match “One of the happy surprises of the end of the literary season.”—Livres Hebdo “A highly moving portrait of the artist.”—Elle (France) This book 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.

A collection of memorabilia brings together the art of the Surrealist photographer and artist while documenting her seven-year affair with Pablo Picasso and considering her role as a friend and sexually unconventional woman.

For the first time, a comprehensive exploration of Dora Maar’s enigmatic photography reveals her as an extraordinary and influential artist in her own right. Dora Maar (born Henriette Théodora Markovitch, 1907–1997) was active at the height of Surrealism in France. She was recognized as a key member of the movement and maintained professional relationships with many of its prominent figures, such as André Breton, Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Man Ray. However, her standing as the one-time muse and mistress of Pablo Picasso—his famous “Weeping Woman”—has long eclipsed her creative output and minimized her influence. Richly illustrated with 240 key works showcasing Maar’s inimitable acumen as a photographer, this book examines the full arc of her career for the very first time. Subjects include her innovative commercial and fashion photography, her approach to the nude and eroticism, engagement with political groups, interest in socially concerned photography, affiliation with the Surrealist movement, and hitherto unknown work from her reclusive late career, providing a dynamic and multifaceted examination of an important artist.

An exquisite volume on the beautiful, talented, and mysterious Dora Maar, showcasing her Surrealist photography, her life with Pablo Picasso, and her friendships with Surrealists in 1930s Paris. Highly regarded as a Surrealist photographer in the 1930s, Dora Maar was a fellow student with Henri Cartier-Bresson and friends with Brassaï, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and André Breton, the charismatic leader of the Surrealists. When Maar met Picasso in the mid-1930s, she became the most influential of his many muses, inspiring much of what is considered to be his best work. But during the ten years they were together, she abandoned her career as an acclaimed professional photographer and instead photographed Picasso, including her famous series of him painting Guernica. While Maar was considered an influential Surrealist photographer, most of her work vanished from the public eye once she stopped creating it in the late 1930s. Now, this volume restores her photographs to their place in history, featuring a treasure trove of incredible and never-before-published images. An important look at Surrealist photography, Dora Maar is also beautifully illustrated with photographs celebrating Maar’s friendships with leading artists and intellectuals of the day, such as Georges Bataille (Maar’s former lover), glamorous Nusch Éluard and her husband, the poet Paul Éluard, and arts patron and hostess Marie-Laure de Noailles, evoking the atmosphere of 1930s and ’40s artistic Paris.

James Lord first arrived in Paris toward the end of World War II, a brash but insignificant young man bent on achieving distinction. His immediate priority was nothing less than to make the acquaintance of the greatest artist of our century: Pablo Picasso. How he managed to do this, to persuade the artist to draw not one but two portraits of him, and to become a welcome visitor to Picasso's studio is only the beginning of this haunting and memorable narrative by one of the most gifted and discerning chroniclers of modern art. Picasso and Dora tells the story of Lord's intense but ambivalent relationship with the great artist. More important, however, it relates with detailed candor his long, intimate, complex relationship with Dora Maar, the mistress from whom Picasso was just parting when the young soldier met them. A legendary and reclusive figure, a gifted photographer and painter, still living today in the apartment and country house where Picasso installed her more than half a century ago, Dora Maar is at once the most important and least known of Picasso's loves. Lord's memoir brings her to life with the bold and incisive aptitude for psychological truth which has always characterized his work. The cast of secondary characters in this vivid evocation of the postwar Parisian art world includes Balthus, Jacques Lacan, Andre Masson, Giacometti, and numerous others. Picasso and Dora represents a new - and permanent - contribution to the history of art in our time.

Françoise Gilot's candid memoir remains the most revealing portrait of Picasso written, and gives fascinating insight into the intense and creative life shared by two modern artists. Françoise Gilot was in her early twenties when she met the sixty-one-year-old Pablo Picasso in 1943. Brought up in a well-to-do upper-middle-class family, who had sent her to Cambridge and the Sorbonne and hoped that she would go into law, the young woman defied their wishes and set her sights on being an artist. Her introduction to Picasso led to a friendship, a love affair, and a relationship of ten years, during which Gilot gave birth to Picasso’s two children, Paloma and Claude. Gilot was one of Picasso’s muses; she was also very much her own woman, determined to make herself into the remarkable painter she did indeed become. Life with Picasso, written with Carlton Lake and published in 1961, is about Picasso the artist and Picasso the man. We hear him talking about painting and sculpture, his life, his career, as well as other artists, both contemporaries and old masters. We glimpse Picasso in his many and volatile moods, dismissing his work, exultant over his work, entertaining his various superstitions, being an anxious father. But Life with Picasso is not only a portrait of a great artist at the height of his fame; it is also a picture of a talented young woman of exacting intelligence at the outset of her own notable career.

The classic Photofile series brings together the best work of the world's greatest photographers in an attractive format and at a reasonable price. Handsome and collectible, the books each contain reproductions in color and/or duotone, plus a critical introduction and a bibliography. Paris in the early 1920s saw the growth of a new art form called surrealism. Both a formal movement and a spiritual orientation, surrealism embraced ethics and politics as well as the arts. Surrealists sought to create a medium that liberated the subconscious mind, and many artists and photographers captured this revolution through photographic images. This new survey includes works by Max Ernst, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, René Magritte, Meret Oppenheim, and more.

Originally published as La mujer que llora (Barcelona: Planeta, 2013).

Edited by Ingrid Mussinger, Beate Ritter and Kerstin Drechsel, Essays by Johannes M. Fox, Norman Mailer, Pierre Daix, Amanda Vail and John Richardson.