THE PARIS MUSE

Author: Louisa Treger

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Reviewer: Beryl Eichenberger

Best-selling UK author Louisa Treger writes about women in history. While she fictionalizes the story the reader steps into their life and times with such ease that you are immersed and wrapped in the story as it unfolds. She seeks out women who are boundary-breaking, colourful and unconventional, ahead of their time, who reject the submissive role women were expected to play. Their stories have sometimes been overlooked so she provides a legacy, a new perspective of a time or famous person and perhaps alerts a new generation to an inspiring story.

It is all of this that she brings to her latest novel, The Paris Muse, perhaps ‘the greatest love affair in art history’ – the Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso relationship. But it is Maar who holds centre stage, who receives the recognition and empathy of Treger’s pen. The prologue of the book, set in 1975 some two years after Picasso’s death, sets the scene, reminding Maar how little her own work is valued, spurring her to tell her story.

I have to admit that I had never heard of Dora Maar so this book was a revelation as Treger intricately and vividly relates an intense and talented life.

Maar and Picasso were together for some 8 years in a passionate ‘agony and ecstasy’ affair. Their tangled partnership in the Paris of the 1930s and early 1940s was almost an analogy of the approaching war. Dora was a committed anti-fascist, not afraid to show it. As her relationship with Picasso progressed so did the marching of the Nazis, artists fearing for their work and their lives; the couple were not immune to this. But she was seen as his muse, inspiring him to some of his most celebrated works; ‘Guernica’ and ‘Weeping Woman’.

But Maar was an artist and photographer in her own right, creative and inventive, a major part of the Surrealist movement. Her early years in Buenos Aires with a needy French mother and an adored Yugoslavian father were protected. But her father recognized her creativity and at 14 years old gave her a camera. She had a unique eye, translated into both photography – a world she never truly left – and painting. Moving to Paris in 1926 allowed her to study and enter the world of art and the artists. She was planted firmly on a career path owning her own studio. Living an independent life.

Manipulating a meeting with her nemesis Picasso revealed her dark side, an action that proved to be a portent to their future. They fed off each other.

Treger tells the story with compassion. It pulses with atmosphere, tensions, laughs and love, bringing the many characters to meaningful life. That the relationship was anguished, cruel and undermining is obvious – highs and desperate lows as the narcissistic Picasso destroys, rebuilds and then discards. It was a toxic, heady love. Unflinching, highlighting the erotic, free living insecurities of the artists circles, it was inevitable that Maar was destroyed when the affair ended.

A retrospective of Maar’s work in 2020 at the Tate Modern was the trigger for Treger to research and write this absorbing novel. It is a look through the window of an artist’s life whose extraordinary legacy can now be seen in her own frame. That feeling is echoed with the cover – a self-portrait of Dora gazing pensively through a window. Highly recommended.