A French auction house is selling a work by Picasso that has not been seen in public for more than 80 years. Buste de femme au chapeau à fleurs (Dora Maar) [Bust of a Woman in a Flowery Hat], which depicts the artist's lover Dora Maar, goes under the hammer at the Drouot salesroom in Paris on 24 October. The work, which has been in a private collection since 1944, has an estimate of €8m.
Consigned to Lucien Paris auction house, Buste de femme au chapeau à fleurs was painted by Picasso in 1943 and acquired by a private French collector the following August. This collector is the grandfather of the current anonymous owners.
Writing in the auction catalogue, the art historian Agnes Sevestre-Barbe describes the painting as “a canvas of major historical and artistic importance” which “sheds fresh light on how Picasso, in the summer of 1943, interwove despair and hope”.
Sevestre-Barbe says that even though the work has remained unseen for decades, it was documented in the Cahiers d’art art journal. Brassaï is also thought to have photographed the painting in Picasso’s studio.
“To our knowledge, it has never been exhibited nor appeared at auction. The few specialists aware of its existence had to content themselves with the black-and-white reproduction published full page by Christian Zervos in 1962 (Cahiers d’art, volume XIII, no. 70), and with the photographs taken by Brassaï between late April and early May 1944,” she writes.
The auction catalogue states that the work is in “very good condition” despite “slight deformations of the canvas in the corners” and the “presence of stable, dry cracks in the red [area] of the hat, top centre”. Crucially the auction house says that an authentication certificate has been issued for the piece by the Comité Picasso—the committee established to verify the originality of the artist’s works.
For a wider public Maar has been defined by Picasso’s depictions of her, particularly as the Weeping Woman (1937). A major survey that opened in 2019 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris portrayed Maar in a new light, allowing her to emerge from her lovers shadow.
Born Henriette Theodora Markovitch in 1907, to a French mother and Croatian father, she grew up in Argentina but began studying photography in the late 1920s after the family moved to Paris. By the early 1930s she was making studio-based commercial photography, often in collaboration with the set designer Pierre Kéfer. After meeting Picasso in 1936 she moved towards painting.
Maar’s separation from Picasso affected her mental health and her later years were spent largely in isolation. She did not exhibit her work and even declined requests for her photographs to be reproduced. Only since her death in 1997 has her reputation begun to be restored.