color lithograph, heavyweight vellum paper; 45 x 37 cm (composition), 70 x 50 cm (sheet);
signed on board under composition p. d. "Picasso" and numbered in pencil "144/200"; l.d. dry publisher's stamp with the inscription "PICASSO"; on the back, color facsimile of Picasso's drawing of the so-called "headpiece" with signature and publisher's information - "Copyright Foundation Pablo Picasso" / amount of edition (200 pieces) / each piece numbered. Original certificate.
Picasso met Dora Maar in 1936 at Les Deux Magots, where he liked to go after evening walks. Many years later, Picasso said, Dora was wearing black gloves with embroidered rose blossoms that evening. She was amusing herself by poking places between the fingers of her left hand lying on the table with a knife, and Picasso asked Dora to give him her bloody gloves. He had kept them in a special box all his life.
Dora Maar was a nervous and restless creature who made her mark in Picasso's art as a "crying woman." With Maar's image, Picasso painted dozens of portraits of Dora Maar and took a kind of retrospective tour of his work with her - she was represented in all the styles and modes of painting the artist had tried before. However, even Picasso himself noted that he could never paint her smiling. The most typical feature of Dora's portraits are her large and deep eyes, full of tears, anxiety, sadness or simply dreamy.
