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The Musée national Picasso Paris, housed in the historic Hôtel Salé in the Marais district, offers a panoramic view of Picasso’s creative universe. The collection — which includes paintings, sculptures, ceramics, prints, and drawings — spans every period of his career. Many of the works come from the so-called “Picasso’s Picassos” — pieces the artist chose to keep for himself. They reflect his tireless reinvention of form and meaning, as well as his deep dialogue with other artists, such as Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne, and with anonymous African and Oceanic creators whose sculptures he collected. The museum also preserves Picasso’s archives — items that deepen the historical, artistic, and emotional scope of the collection.
The Musée national Picasso–Paris highlights the profound artistic and personal relationship between Pablo Picasso and the photographer and surrealist artist Dora Maar. Born Henriette Théodora Markovitch (1907–1997), Maar was far more than a muse—she was a politically engaged artist and a keen observer of the world around her.
Picasso met Dora Maar in 1935, and their relationship unfolded alongside a turbulent political and artistic era. She was present during his shift from personal mythologies to overt political engagement, as evidenced in Guernica, and her photographs remain essential documents of that process.
At the request of art critic Christian Zervos, Maar documented the making of Guernica in the spring of 1937 inside Picasso’s studio on rue des Grands-Augustins. She captured eight successive stages of the painting’s development — tracing its transformation.
Picasso himself told Zervos he was “very curious to record photographically, not the stages of a painting, but its metamorphoses.”
Maar’s lens became that recording — witnessing not just the painter at work, but the birth of one of the most potent political artworks of the 20th century.
Dora Maar features prominently in several of Picasso’s portraits, most iconically in the 1937 painting Portrait of Dora Maar, which is part of the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris. This striking work was created a year after their relationship began, capturing Maar’s complex presence in Picasso’s life and art.
Their first brief encounter occurred in late 1935, but it was in 1936, at the Les Deux Magots café in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district of Paris, that they were formally introduced by the poet Paul Éluard. Both Maar and Picasso were not only artists but also deeply engaged in the intellectual and leftist political circles of the time.
At the age of 55, Picasso became enamored with the 29-year-old Maar. The two soon began living together, marking the start of a passionate and creatively significant relationship that lasted nearly a decade. However, Picasso continued his involvement with Marie-Thérèse Walter, the mother of his daughter Maya, which created emotional strain. These tensions eventually led to the couple’s separation in 1943.
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