Dora Maar Quotes

All Picasso's portraits of me are lies. They're all Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar

Pablo's many stories and reminiscences about Olga and Marie-Thérese and Dora Maar, as well as their continuing presence just offstage in our own life together, gradually made me realize that he had a kind of Bluebeard complex that made him want to cut off the heads of all women he had collected in his private museum. But he didn't cut the heads entirely off. He preferred to have life go on and to have all those women who had shared his life at one moment or another still letting out little peeps and cries of joy or pain and making a few gestures like disjointed dolls, just to prove there was some life left in them, that it hung by a thread, and that he held the other end of the thread. From time to time they would provide a humorous or dramatic or sometimes tragic side to things, and that was all grist to his mill.

Average artists copy their peers, but the true great artistic gesture lies in the shamelessness of stealing and getting away with it.

Dora on her mother: "Without ever knowing what she wanted from life, she knew she hadn't received it

André Breton on Jacqueline Lamba: "I had seen her enter here several times before. And I can certainly say that, here, on the twenty-ninth of May, 1934, this woman was scandalously beautiful. She was writing; she had also been writing the day before, and even then I was taken by the idea that she was writing to me, surprised even to find myself awaiting her letter

feeling.

In een tekst over het Derde Rijk heeft Dora eens een beschrijving gevonden hoe in een kenterende maatschappij de angst het roer overneemt. Hoe bijna onwaarneembaar nieuwe criteria de kleinste dagelijkse beslissingen binnensluipen. Wat je nog tegen wie mag zeggen. Wanneer je een restaurant beter kunt verlaten, of een andere route naar je werk kunt nemen. Je hersenen wennen aan de kaders van de angst, integreren ze in je denken en wissen de sporen uit. Je lijdt niet aan angst, je praktiseert hem. Je past je aan de veranderde situatie aan, tot je pijnloos met de achtergrond versmelt. Dit mechanisme zorgt ervoor dat de verschrikkelijke dingen op de wereld zich blijven herhalen. Er bestaat maar één remedie tegen: niet het kwaad dient bestreden te worden, maar je eigen angst.

This address book was a snapshot of her world in 1951: layers of friends and acquaintances accumulated over the years, and a few new ones, surely. But who really mattered in this list? Who telephoned her? What numbers did she dial? If someone found our smartphone contacts today, wouldn't they see our favorites, reconstruct the history of our calls, read our texts and emails, listen to our messages? They would know our entires lives. This book of hers was silent as the grave.