Beyond the Weeping Woman By Terry Ehret

Dora Maar, 1942

He can wholly possess her only as long as she fits into

the picture

that his imagination is always arranging.

−Jaime Sabartes and Wilhelm Boeck, Pablo Picasso

I hold my hand in my hand

below the frame

things are in place—so, just so.

Here is the dress I have always worn. Here is my hair, my

mouth,

my jaw, my arms like two schoolgirls

awkward and fixed agains my side

as if they ought not to be there at all,

having no business being there at all.

73“This part of the painting will be black” he says,

bending my elbow to fit a little

more into the lower edge. “It will be

dark, even monstrious, and you will not like it there.

On your forehead a furrow above the eyebrow

because w hen you look, there is an absence you want to

fill

and it makes you very proud, very vulnerable—nothing

dangerous.

“The death of your father sits

behind you

on the wall that is gray. It

moves

up from the floor in the lines of

your dress,

over your breasts. But see, I

will paint here a white collar

for you, white with a lace edge,

because if I

were to take it away now not even a

red hat would keep you from breaking into

angles, your teeth clenched in your hand,

your eyes the eyes

of birds of prey.”

I wrote this ekphrastic poem almost 40 years ago, based

on two portraits by Pablo Picasso of Dora Maar (Henriette

Theodora Markovitch). I didn’t know much about Maar,

only that Picasso claimed she was a nervous and troubled

creature, prone to fits of weeping. But there was

something in the way Picasso had arranged hismodel/muse/lover that made me bristle at his manipulation

and identify with Dora Maar’s underlying rage—a rage his

painting couldn’t tame.When Dora Maar died in Paris in

1997, the art world that had previously known her as

Picasso’s mistress began to recognize the scope of her

legacy as a surrealist painter, photographer, and political

activist who both threatened and inspired Picasso. About

the “weeping woman” name he gave her, and his

characterization of her in his portraits, Maar said, “All his

portraits of me are lies. They're all Picassos. Not one is

Dora Maar.” Her fits of weeping may have symbolized to

Picasso the zeitgeist of the 1930s and 40s, but it was

Maar’s politics that shaped his great anti-war mural,

Guernica. Prior to this, Picasso’s work didn’t have

political messages, but Maar, who was fiercely anti-

fascist, made sure Picasso kept the spotlight on what

mattered. And it wasn’t until he included Maar as the

weeping woman that the mural found its voice, its heart,

its outrage, and its power. In another ekphrastic poem in

75this series, I traced the evolution of Guernica (just as

Maar had recorded its evolution through her photographs),

and could see so very clearly how static the mural would

have been without her: “the weeping woman, who hasn’t

yet appeared/and her dead child will change//everything/

she will make the canvas scream.”

Guernica by Pablo Picasso, 1937

“Dora Maar, 1942” originally published in Lost Body

(Copper Canyon Press, 1992).

“The Thought She Might: Picasso Portraits,” Translations

from the Human Language (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2001)

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