by Tom Gurney
Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000
Introduction
In Pablo Picasso's Dora Maar au chat, a woman sits upright in a chair while a small black cat balances on its back, close to her shoulder. Her flower-trimmed hat, striped blouse, patterned skirt and long, pointed fingers fill a canvas almost as restless as the animal's silhouette. There is little quiet space. The figure is monumental, but neither the chair nor the decorations settle into a simple, stable arrangement. Picasso made a portrait that can appear both ceremonial and uneasy without telling us exactly what either sensation meant to its sitter.[1]
The specific work is an oil painting signed and dated “Picasso 41.” at lower left. Sotheby's recorded it as 129.5 by 97 centimetres when it appeared as lot 14 in a 2006 New York sale. Its French title means “Dora Maar with Cat.” These particulars matter because Picasso made many portraits of Maar, including other seated figures and works called simply Portrait de Dora Maar. A date, medium and identifiable black cat separate this 1941 canvas from those other pictures.[1][2]
At a Glance
- Sitter: Dora Maar
- Scene: A seated figure with a small black cat on the chair
- Visual character: Patterned costume and sharply shaped fingers fill the canvas
Dora Maar au Chat in Picasso's career
First Communion
1896Three Musicians
1921Guernica
1937Las Meninas series
1957The highlighted work is dated with the qualifications explained in the sources on this page. The other works are selective points of comparison, not the start or end of a style.
Contents
- What is in the painting?
- Dora Maar was an artist, not just a sitter
- A portrait made in occupied Paris
- The cat and the limits of interpretation
- From Paris collection to a 2006 sale
- Which Dora Maar portrait?
What is in the painting?
Maar occupies almost the full height of the portrait. Her hat rises close to the top edge; the length of her body and dress presses against the chair that contains it. The cat, by contrast, is small and dark, perched behind rather than in her lap. Their difference in scale helps make the woman's presence commanding, yet the cat keeps the composition from becoming a straightforward image of solitary grandeur. It draws the eye away from the face and back along the chair's upper edge.[1]
The hat is not a neutral piece of clothing. Flowers and strong colour make it one of the painting's most conspicuous shapes. Around it Picasso sets a face whose contours change direction abruptly: one part turns toward us while another seems to slide into profile. The face remains readable as a likeness without being organised by a single conventional viewpoint. Her shoulders and body likewise join different angles rather than conforming to a measured anatomical pose.[1]
Stripes travel across the upper body; spots and other repeated marks animate the lower dress. Such patterns give the painter ways to model and interrupt the body at once. A stripe can suggest the fold of a garment, then become a graphic line with a life of its own. The chair's angled members answer these forms. Picasso did not leave an empty background to isolate a calm figure: pattern, line and furniture continue the painting's energy around her.[1]
The hands are especially prominent. Their fingers taper sharply, and their positions make them part of the painting's angular design. One might describe them as elegant, theatrical or unsettling. None of those visual responses proves what Maar felt or what Picasso intended to say about her personality. A portrait can exaggerate features for compositional force without providing a reliable report on the person portrayed.[1]
The cat may be the detail that viewers remember first, but its meaning is less fixed than its location. It is visibly a black animal perched behind the seated figure. Its ears and silhouette interrupt the flow of the chair and bring a compact dark shape beside the brightly coloured clothes. The painting does not identify a particular pet. Nor does its mere presence establish that Maar was being cast as sinister, seductive or hostile. Those are possible associations brought to an image, not facts inscribed on the canvas.[1]
The work's large size is easy to miss on a phone screen. At roughly 1.3 metres tall, it presents a sitter approaching the viewer's own bodily scale. Small reproductions emphasise the lively costume; standing before the original would also mean confronting a substantial painted surface and the way its forms fill that surface. The recorded medium is oil on canvas, not a drawing or a print. Its colour and physical scale belong to the original object, not to the often simplified posters and digital images that have circulated under the same title.[1]
Dora Maar was an artist, not just a sitter
Dora Maar was born Henriette Théodora Markovitch in Paris in 1907. She trained in both painting and photography and developed a career before she met Picasso in the mid-1930s. The Centre Pompidou records her early professional commissions, a photographic studio shared with Pierre Kéfer, and her own studio in Paris from 1935. She worked in fashion and advertising photography, made street images in Barcelona, Paris and London, and participated in surrealist art. Her photomontages and photographs such as Portrait d'Ubu belong to that independent practice.[3]
This background changes the way we approach Picasso's portrait. It does not mean every painted flower, line or cat is a secret reference to one of Maar's photographs. It does mean that the woman in the chair was herself a maker of images who knew how a portrait could construct a persona. The Centre Pompidou's 2019 retrospective deliberately presented her photographic, surrealist and later painted work together. Treating her only as Picasso's “muse” or “mistress” would obscure that career and would make the portrait stand in for a life it cannot encompass.[3]
Maar was also closely involved in the visual record of Picasso's Guernica. The Museo Reina Sofía attributes to her the photographs documenting its development between 11 May and 4 June 1937, undertaken at Christian Zervos's request. Photographing such a large canvas in a poorly lit studio was technically demanding. Maar used retouching, internegatives and copies from prints to make the changing composition legible. These images are not passive snapshots taken by an unidentified helper: they are the work of a named photographer solving practical and visual problems.[4]
That 1937 project preceded Dora Maar au chat by four years. It establishes artistic and historical proximity between the two people, but it is not a key that unlocks the 1941 painting's emotions. Maar's artistic life continued beyond her relationship with Picasso. The Pompidou describes later paintings and photographic experiments. A responsible account of this canvas can acknowledge the relationship without turning her own work into a footnote to his.[3][4]
Watch: Pablo Picasso
Explore Picasso through five videos from museums, broadcasters and art educators.
Picasso’s Guernica: Great Art Explained
Explore the composition and historical setting of Picasso’s best-known response to war.
Watch on YouTubeA portrait made in occupied Paris
The date on the painting places it in 1941, during the German occupation of Paris. Picasso's portraiture of Maar in those years often used angular faces, insistent patterns and dramatic contrasts. The historical setting matters: war, restrictions and uncertainty formed part of the surrounding life in which artist and sitter worked. But Dora Maar au chat is not an illustrated report of a battle or a documented statement of Maar's feelings about the occupation. To convert every distortion into a direct symptom of war would make the painting less, not more, precise.[1][2]
The canvas itself gives only the year. A related drawing supplies a narrower, but still provisional, chronology. Christie's records Picasso's Femme assise dans un fauteuil, an ink-and-pencil drawing of a seated Maar, signed and dated 28 September 1941. Its catalogue relates that sheet to two seated-figure oil portraits dated 5 October and suggests that Dora Maar au chat probably followed within a few weeks, in October or November. This is a comparison across different works, not a month written on the cat painting. The secure public date remains 1941.[2]
The comparison is useful because it reveals Picasso's repeated investigation of a seated figure without making all the portraits interchangeable. The September drawing is only 21.3 by 16.3 centimetres and uses ink and pencil. The Au chat canvas is a much larger oil painting. Their related stripes, fragmented features and chair motif suggest a line of pictorial development, while their scale, medium and final arrangements differ. It would be misleading to call the drawing a known preparatory study for every element of the later canvas unless a source demonstrated that direct function.[1][2]
Likewise, the portrait does not require a simple opposition between Maar and other women in Picasso's life. Older auction writing contrasts her intellect with supposedly more “docile” partners and reads his various female sitters as fixed types. Such language is a view of personal relationships offered after the fact, not an objective description of the picture or of those women. In this work, Maar's striped clothes, posture and cat should be examined as this painting's choices, not as proof that a real person fitted an artist's symbolic category.[1][3]
The cat and the limits of interpretation
An auction catalogue has read the cat as carrying charged associations, including sexual and threatening ones. It also compares the painting with longer traditions of representing women beside cats. That is an interpretation worth recognising as part of the work's reception, not a proven explanation supplied by Picasso. The fact that a motif has associations elsewhere in art does not establish one exact meaning each time an artist uses it.[1]
The visible relationship here is more interesting than a single code. The cat's compact dark form is placed high behind the figure; its shape interrupts the chair. The sitter's long fingers add another set of narrow, pointed forms. A viewer can notice a formal echo between them without concluding that Picasso deliberately equated Maar with an animal. The cat might make the setting feel domestic, playful or watchful. These effects can coexist, and their ambiguity helps keep the portrait active for different viewers.[1]
The flowered hat also invites symbolic stories. Sotheby's catalogue frames it as a sign of Maar's surrealist identity. Maar did indeed participate in surrealist circles, as her own photographic work shows. Yet a hat in a portrait can be at once clothing, a compositional flourish and a possible allusion. There is no need to choose a single, undocumented psychological explanation. The stronger observation is how the colourful shape crowns the sitter and is answered by the restless patterns below it.[1][3]
This caution is not an attempt to drain feeling from Picasso's work. On the contrary, the figure's poised frontality and the fractured details create an expressive tension. It is possible to say what the painting makes visible—the commanding scale, shifting face, brilliant costume and off-centre cat—while leaving open whether a viewer reads splendour, anxiety, humour or conflict in their combination. A public account should not diagnose its sitter from a painted expression or claim access to Picasso's unrecorded thoughts.[1]
From Paris collection to a 2006 sale
The painting's known ownership history begins with the Paris dealer Pierre Colle, who held it by 1946. Sotheby's then records Mr and Mrs Leigh B. Block of Chicago as owners by 1947. It was on summer loan to the Art Institute of Chicago that year. Berggruen & Cie in Paris later acted as the Blocks' agent, and the next owner acquired the work on 1 July 1963. Those are recorded stages, not a complete account of every movement of the painting from Picasso's studio.[1]
The picture was neither undocumented nor wholly unseen before the twenty-first century. Sotheby's lists a 1946 publication and the 1947 loan, along with exhibitions at Worcester Art Museum in 1962 and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1968. The sale catalogue's phrase that it was “largely unknown” should be understood against this record rather than repeated as if the canvas had never been exhibited. Public exposure, publication and ownership are different questions.[1]
The record also preserves a useful correction. The 1946 book and the 1962 and 1968 exhibition catalogues treated the work as a 1944 painting. Sotheby's 2006 object description, however, reads the signature and date “Picasso 41.” on the canvas and catalogues it as 1941. In the absence of contrary material evidence, the signed date is stronger than those earlier catalogue attributions. Its 1941 dating also aligns with the related late-September and early-October portraits, although that comparison does not establish a precise day for this canvas.[1][2]
In 2006 Sotheby's sold Dora Maar au chat for US$95,216,000, which the firm later identified as its top lot of that year. The price is a fact about a particular sale at a particular time. It is not the painting's current market value, and it does not reveal what Picasso or Maar thought of it. Nor should a high price dictate the amount of attention given to an artist's own photography: Maar's work matters for its history and form, not only because a painting of her became expensive.[1][6]
Which Dora Maar portrait?
Picasso painted Maar repeatedly, including images associated with the Weeping Woman subject. The Museo Reina Sofía, for example, holds a different Portrait de Dora Maar dated 27 March 1939. That work is oil on board and measures 60 by 45 centimetres. Its similar subject and generic title do not make it the 1941 canvas with a cat. Other seated portraits from 1941 provide close comparisons but likewise have their own dates and cataloguing. A search result or a print labelled merely “Portrait of Dora Maar” is therefore not enough to identify an original Picasso object.[1][2][5]
For this painting, the identifying features are the black cat behind the seated figure, the flowered hat and strongly patterned costume, the inscription “Picasso 41.”, oil on canvas and the recorded dimensions of 129.5 by 97 centimetres. A small poster labelled only “Portrait of Dora Maar” could instead show another painting entirely. Its title or border does not establish this canvas's identity, support, measurements or colour accuracy.[1]
Dora Maar au chat rewards a double attention. Its exact identity and provenance can be checked against the 2006 Sotheby's lot record[1], while its impact remains open to looking and interpretation. The painting presents Maar with striking visual force, but it cannot replace the independent record of her photographs, photomontages and paintings. Seeing both the portrait and the artist portrayed gives a fuller account than a story about a woman, a cat and Picasso alone.[1][3]
Discussion
Use the evidence and your own close looking to explain your view. These are editorial prompts, not reader comments.
Reader Insights
How does the small cat change the balance of the seated figure?
Which details are secure visual description rather than a claim about Maar’s feelings?
What does the object’s documented history add to a famous auction story?
Join the Conversation
Which reading best fits the evidence?
References
- Sotheby's, Dora Maar au chat, lot 14, 2006.
- Christie's, Femme assise dans un fauteuil, 28 September 1941.
- Centre Pompidou, Dora Maar biography, French; Dora Maar retrospective, 2019, French.
- Museo Reina Sofía, Dora Maar's photographic record of Guernica; Spanish version.
- Museo Reina Sofía, Portrait de Dora Maar, 1939.
- Sotheby's, top lot by year retrospective.
Image Credits
- Celette. CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Resized proportionally to 1024px wide; no crop. Source record. Licence.
- Bonachera jf, 18 May 2016. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Proportional resize only; derivative retains CC BY-SA 4.0. Source record. Licence.
