During the late 1930s, three of Picasso’s romantic relationships overlapped. He had been married to Olga Khokhlova, a Ukrainian ballet dancer, since 1918 and involved with Marie-Thérèse Walter since 1927. In 1935, while Walter was pregnant with their daughter, Maya, Picasso began an affair with Surrealist photographer and painter Dora Maar. He painted dozens of portraits of these women, each with their own set of coded characteristics. About his abusive treat- ment of women, Picasso’s and Khokhlova’s granddaughter Marina wrote: “He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. . . once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them.”

Picasso frequently pictured Maar in distress, often isolated in a small room, as in Bust of a Seated Woman and Bust of a Woman (Dora Maar), to the right; he once claimed he could only ever imagine her crying, as he depicted her in Weeping Woman with Handkerchief (on view nearby). Maar resented this portrayal, asserting that “All [Picasso’s] portraits of me are lies. . . . Not one is Dora Maar.”

Wall label, 2021.