Picasso and Dora
Lord, James
PICASSO AND DORA: A PERSONAL MEMOIR James Lord Farrar, Straus & Giroux/340 pages /$35 reviewed by M. D. CARNEGIE 0 n three-day leave from duty as an intelligence officer in World War II, with...
...She gave Lord a small Picasso sculpture, then took it back...
...Embarrassed at not having thought to bring along some of his officer's booty, the young soldier anyway made enough of an impression that Picasso invited him to visit again soon...
...When the Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary in 1956, Lord wrote a bristling open letter to Picasso, whom he no longer saw, demanding that he denounce the Communist Party he'd belonged to for more than a decade...
...Maar was noticeably cool to him throughout the meal...
...Can you remain silent while the cries of patriots and the screams of innocent victims echo still among the ruins of Budapest...
...Albert Camus's journal Combat published the letter, which read in part: You have chosen to live before the world...
...Besides Picasso, though, only Dora's opinion of his action mattered to him...
...He humiliated his former mistress in public, treating her abominably in front of friends, and once sent her a hideously ugly chair he'd bought, knowing she'd cherish it as a gift from the master...
...Lord, charmed for good by Paris and the life he found there, returned after the war to write mediocre novels, broker the odd work of art, cultivate the company of artists famed and obscure, and make love to students and soldiers...
...Homosexual since having been introduced to the predilection as a youth in quite another Paris—the one in Maine—Lord had cultivated a passion for painting in the Museum of Modern Art, on periodic visits to New York to attend to his teeth, the local dentist having been deemed unfit for Lord's aristocratic mandible...
...They met over the artist's breakfast, wartime exigencies limiting Picasso to two pieces of bread and a bowl of coffee...
...But there are souls for whom art is so powerful that no order of common truth, no simple mediocrity can suffice them...
...It is a poignant image, the American The American Spectator January 1994 63 who'd become a self-styled aesthete, surrounded by the soigné set of tout Paris who once adored him and now reviled him for his heresy...
...Then, she let go and walked away, adding, "It's a pity...
...They enjoy, or suffer, a magnificent magnification of the senses, and their every gesture is a realization of an inner vision, a wonderment at hue and texture, space and shapeliness...
...Blessed with a certain income and the aristocrat's birthright of laziness, Lord might have been content merely to live as a bon vivant, making love and conversation, sipping raspberry cocktails with Somerset Maugham, rubbing elbows with genius, and collecting the art of the known and the soon-to-be...
...Alberto Giacometti, a friend who privately criticized Picasso's politics, was outraged...
...The organizing principle of their lives guides perception, not action—what they take in, in other words, not what they give out...
...For consistency's sake he limped away on his departure, as well as upon his return two days later—when M. D. Carnegie is a contributing writer for Washington CityPaper...
...it was Picasso, after all, who had claimed art is a lie that makes us realize the truth...
...Two years later, when Maar had a new exhibition of her work, Lord attended the opening and purchased a painting, knowing they were not selling well and that the dealer would tell Maar the buyer's name...
...He looked everywhere for Maar...
...Picasso's goings-on, of course, were plastered all over newspapers worldwide...
...The American Spectator January 1994 Lord's frank and engrossing memoir recounts what happened to them all after that December afternoon...
...Jaime Sabartes, Picasso's secretary and majordomo, invited him in, and when Lord stumbled nervously, Saban& mistakenly assumed he'd been wounded in the war...
...Lord had bought the mediocre painting as a gesture of kindness, but in opposition to the artistes he had already placed his feet firmly on the side of the political...
...0 64 The American Spectator January 1994...
...But Lord seems always to have been possessed of the soul of the artist, and his sympathy for artistic perspective and temperament—and his facility for limning their allure—steeps this memoir in fascination and grace...
...Heartfelt and accurate enough, the letter was perhaps a last gasp of homespun naïveté in the sophisticated environs of artistic Europe...
...Like most Americans, however, Lord was ultimately commonsensical about politics...
...she still lives in the Vaucluse, in the house Picasso bought her...
...You're determined to turn the whole world against you, aren't you...
...And Dora was a troubled penitent, niggardly, aggrandized by her role as mistress to the greatest artist of the century, and insecure about her failure to find another role afterward...
...With only seventy-two hours to spare and nought but his impetuousness to recommend him, the young officer found his way to the rue des Grands-Augustins, number 7, and presented himself at the studio of the painter Pablo Picasso...
...Picasso was a bounder, an egomaniac, a cruel and self-absorbed monster...
...Saban& had promised Lord a private audience with the boss...
...B ut what ultimately redeems this tale is Lord's richness of vision, a sympathy for the complexity of existence that lifts this memoir to the level of which Lord for so long dreamed—that of art...
...Those who possess it might just as fairly be said to be afflicted with it;they are not souls inseparably allied to the truth, given to prompt payment of debts, or prone to much else we associate with the virtues...
...The master smiled, and the party left without being presented a bill...
...This time he brought a musette bag full of goodies—including a pencil and drawing paper, which he presented to the artist with a request for a portrait...
...Lord allowed the error to pass uncorrected, an instantaneous decision that doubtless served only to better marshal the secretary's favor...
...Those not inclined to see this as other than sophistry will be put off by Lord's forthright account of the trio's lives...
...It was his first visit to Paris...
...If so, I say to you that the world can remain indifferent before Guernica...
...6 6 nA aptitude for pretense," Lord writes of his limping deception of Picasso and Sabartes, "and a readiness to resort to the virtue of false appearances might have seemed to present problems beyond the competence of a young man utterly unversed in the manipulations of point of view that art takes for granted...
...So Lord, keenly aware that the falsehood of his limp may have played a great role in the coup of currying the artist's favor, claimed to Picasso that the portrait he'd executed had suffered a misfortune...
...Had Lord not really learned that art was a lie...
...As did his ancestor Patrick Henry, Lord chose liberty, and found it in the freedom of Paris and the thrilling unrestraint of its bohemian life...
...The artist made another, as if in payment for another of Lord's prevarications...
...Picasso assented, promising to execute the drawing over lunch...
...She's doubtless doubly mortified now...
...Marie-Lavre de Noailles said, "You have disparaged the honor of a Spaniard...
...But they had separated, as well, Lord having sent a lengthy litany of complaints to her before his open letter to Picasso...
...And Maar, who had been a mistress of the erotic philosopher Georges Bataille and a photographer connected with the original Surrealists, fell apart after Picasso dumped her, entered psychoanalysis with Jacques Lacan, and steadily retreated into her Catholic faith, the Vaucluse house the artist had given her, and a mesmerizing and unconsummated affair with James Lord...
...Picasso executed another drawing on the paper table-covering, and before the three prepared to leave, she neatly cut it out, rolled it up, and put it in her bag...
...He "borrowed" the house he gave Maar to take another girlfriend there...
...Indeed, "an aptitude for pretense" seemed a necessary skill in Lord's newfound world...
...Having contrived to get his portrait done by the world-famous Picasso, Lord was nevertheless unsatisfied with the sketch, and afterwards tampered with the drawing by adding three lines of his own...
...And Lord did, three days later, serendipitously having missed the train to reassignment in Brittany...
...And it is the world today which is going to judge your life...
...in their travels she made him pay for most everything, though she possessed a priceless collection of art—mostly Picassos...
...PICASSO AND DORA: A PERSONAL MEMOIR James Lord Farrar, Straus & Giroux/340 pages /$35 reviewed by M. D. CARNEGIE 0 n three-day leave from duty as an intelligence officer in World War II, with the Nazis in retreat but the horror of the Ardennes yet a fortnight away, James Lord alit from a train in the Gare Saint-Lazare...
...They dined at a black market restaurant with the artist's mistress, and this was how James Lord met Dora Maar...
...My poor James," she said, grasping it...
...They had both worshiped Picasso, elevated him to a deity, and come to love each other in their quirky, unresolved fashion...
...It is a sensory hypertrophy, daunting to those who lack it—Lord recounts his awe that on a country road once, Picasso identified him as he passed in the opposite direction at over 60 m.p.h.—but an imbalance nevertheless...
...Finally he caught her eye and held out his hand, thinking she'd let ideological bygones be bygones...
...Can the painter of Guernica remain indifferent to the martyrdom of Hungary...
...Picasso and Dora is a seductive evocation of the rough texture of experience, the awfulness that accompanies one man's brilliant vision, the beauty that visits upon another's laziness...
Vol. 27 • January 1994 • No. 1
