Nan Colton as Dora Maar

In this presentation Dora Maar, portrayed by author and actress Nan Colton, shares her point of view of the roles she played as she stood literally center stage of the Surrealist movement as it was sweeping the art world of the time. It is a fictitious conversation recalling the most passionate and disastrous love affair of her life and her assessment during her later years of what she gained and lost.   

Dora Maar (1907–1997): Painter, photographer, poet and Picasso’s “muse,” Dora Maar photographed Picasso creating the famous black and white anti-war mural, Guernica. Dora captured with her camera each modification of the creation of a modern masterpiece. Her goal was to “to preserve photographically not the stages but the metamorphoses of a picture.” She is Picasso’s principal model, whom he often represented in tears –“The Weeping Woman”. Dora's influence was to stimulate one of the most innovative periods of Picasso’s career. The complex personal and artistic liaison between Picasso and Dora would last nearly nine years spanning the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War to the end of the Second World War. (Her passionate and disastrous liaison with Picasso, ended in 1943.)

At 11 feet tall and 25 feet long, Pablo Picasso’s mural Guernica is one of the biggest and most important works by the modernist master. Picasso’s painting is based on the events of April 27, 1937, when Hitler’s powerful German air force, acting in support of Franco, bombed the village of Guernica in northern Spain, a city of no strategic military value. It was history’s first aerial saturation bombing of a civilian population. Guernica is a powerful symbol of the horrors of war for protesters around the world.

Host or Publisher Gulfport (FL) Senior Center Foundation