Picasso and Dora: A Personal Memoir - Hardcover

Lord, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374232083 ISBN 13: 9780374232085

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1993

Synopsis

As a young soldier at the end of World War II, Lord achieved his ambition of meeting Picasso. This elegantly written memoir recounts his subsequent intense and enduring relationship with the artist and with Picasso's mistress, Dora Maar, a legendary and reclusive figure. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

About this title

From AudioFile:

This personal memoir recounts the author's acquaintance with the great artist and one of his many mistresses, beginning in 1944 and continuing through the book's first publication in 1993. Lord encounters a number of other famous artists, writers and socialites of that period of French society and includes numerous anecdotes of such in the book. John Edwardson's reading of the lengthy work appears to capture the author's intended tone exactly. The details, however, reveal a level of self-absorption often cumbersome to the story. Edwardson captures this by adopting a pseudo-intellectual, self-important tone of voice. However, the author's emotional reactions to Picasso and Dora and the situations in which they interact are fascinating. A well-done abridgment, again read by Edwardson, would do a great service to the presentation. R.P.L. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Kirkus Reviews:

An intricate and intimate view of Picasso's aloof mistress and model Dora Maar, by onetime-companion Lord (Giacometti, 1985, etc.). An American soldier in Paris in 1944, Lord seeks out Picasso and requests that the artist draw his portrait. Picasso takes Lord to lunch with Maar--the first encounter in what evolves into the author's infatuation with the muse. Maar and her role in Picasso's genius fascinate Lord, who toys with the idea of himself being a ``figment'' of Picasso's ``creative imagination.'' From the fall of 1953 into the spring of 1954, when Maar is 46 and Lord 31, the two have dinner almost every night and spend weeks together away from Paris. Lord claims constant enchantment: ``being with Dora...was the be-all and end-all of thinking as well as of feeling.'' And later: ``I never ceased to be under the spell of her beauty, the lambent gleam of her gaze, the bird-of-paradise voice...all the aura of tense serenity and power and pathos so poignantly portrayed by Picasso.'' Yet the pair's bond is defined by Lord's homosexuality (``seeking promiscuous oblivion in the embraces of boys''). At night, Maar and Lord separate with a ritual kiss, the writer constantly pondering the model's expectations. Lord's narrative, based on a journal, contains countless backstage details--from Picasso's insults at a party given by the collector Douglas Cooper to Dora's attachment to a cigarette lighter that had ``cost'' the artist ``a visit to the Place Vendome.'' But of deeper interest than these anecdotes is a long, climactic letter in which Lord finally denounces his and Maar's unequal roles and the pride, selfishness, and avarice that, he says, isolate Maar--who still lives in Paris, in the same apartment where they so often sat. An account memorable in its frankness about a ``friendship'' that was extraordinary but flawed--not least because of the friends' shared obsession with ``the monarch of twentieth-century art.'' (Illustrations--not seen) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0374232083
• ISBN 13: 9780374232085
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 340