Volume 40, Number 14 · August 12, 1993
Friend of the Great
By Gabriele Annan
Picasso and Dora: A Personal Memoir
by James Lord
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 340 pp., $35.00
This book is not so much about Picasso and Dora as about Dora and James, James being the author James Lord, and Dora Picasso's mistress and model, the photographer-turned-painter Dora Maar. The subject is their friendship. Dora's affair with Picasso is in the past, and he himself doesn't come in that much, except as the raison d'être of the book and the joint obsession of its hero and heroine. His greatness as an artist is beyond any question for both of them; they have both invested heavily in it. As a human being, though, Picasso comes out a monster. Lord's Personal Memoir is constructed as a psychological thriller, artfully working its way to a denouement that comes as a shock, but then—like all the best denouements—turns out to have been half-expected all along. A pretentious mystificatory preface warns that 'truth is famously stranger than fiction but no stranger to fiction.' So one can believe what one likes.
Review, 2345 words
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