PICASSO AND DORA
Picasso, Seated Nude, pencil, 1953; given by the artist to DC and JR (one of the items stolen in the 1974 burglary of Castille)
On February 6, 1954—not quite halfway through my twelve years with Douglas—I turned thirty. Douglas planned a birthday celebration that would also serve as a belated housewarming. But on February 5, the arctic chill that had paralyzed much of Europe turned even fiercer, and for the first time in decades Castille was beautifully blanketed with a heavy fall of snow. Many of our neighbors, among them the Hugos, were marooned without electricity or water, so we put the party off until Easter, when Richard and Ann Wollheim were due to spend a week with us.
On Easter Sunday, Isaiah Berlin and his future wife, Aline Halban, who were staying at Avignon, arrived for lunch. In the afternoon some of us went to the bullfight, after which we had envisaged a quiet evening at home with the Berlins and Wollheims. However, in the course of the corrida, Picasso and Jacqueline announced that they and the rest of their group—sixteen in all, including Picasso’s son, Paulo, and the Ramiés, the Tériades, and Jean Cocteau, plus entourage—would like to dine at Castille; he also announced that he had a present for us. The present turned out to be an Ingresque drawing that had obsessed me ever since I first saw it pinned on a wall at Le Fournas: an uncompromisingly frontal image of a naked girl, legs wide apart, seated like an odalisque on a pile of cushions. It had been heavily worked. To create highlights and smudge shadows, Picasso had used an eraser—a device he admitted borrowing from Matisse. The drawing was far more striking than any of the enormously popular “Verve” series—scenes in which Picasso caricatures himself as an elderly clown or a masked dwarf lusting after a young girl—which he did that same winter. I was surprised at his giving us something so personal until I realized that the gift must have been made at Jacqueline’s behest. She would have had every reason to want this erotic image removed from the studio wall: it represented one of her rivals, Geneviève Laporte. Characteristically, Picasso brought the drawing in the box that had contained the Dior wrap we had given Jacqueline for Christmas. No less characteristically, he kept the box; he liked to incorporate emballage in his work. As Picasso handed over the drawing, he said, presciently, “When you two split up, you’re going to have to cut it in half.” After we broke up, Douglas simply kept it. Sadly, the drawing disappeared when Castille was burgled some years later. So far as I know, it’s still in the hands of the Mafia.
Thanks to our store of truffles, Marie managed to transform slim pickings and cold cuts into the semblance of a feast. For Jacqueline, this was one of her first public appearances as Picasso’s official mistress. She already radiated far more confidence than she had at Perpignan. At dinner Picasso watched sardonically as Cocteau launched into a display of conjuror’s patter so dazzling one could only imagine he hoped to distract attention from its intrinsic triviality. The poet was in tauromachic mode, having made notes during the bullfight of Damaso Gomez’s spectacular performance. These notes, which Cocteau would incorporate in his book La Corrida du 1er Mai, received their first airing in the course of dinner. Meanwhile Isaiah kept his attention on Picasso. He told us later that of all the great men he had known—scientists, historians, philosophers, politicians—Picasso struck him as the most impressive. Hence an unwonted shyness on his part. And then, when the artist readied himself to leave, Isaiah felt impelled to run after him and tell him a story that had amused us at lunch—a story about Lope de Vega on his deathbed. Am I sick? Spain’s most illustrious playwright supposedly asked his doctor. Yes. Dying? Yes. Less than an hour to live? Yes. “Then I can finally confess that Dante bores me.” With a look of terror, Picasso, who had no idea that Isaiah was one of the wisest men in England, jumped into the car and told his son to drive off. For his part, Isaiah had no idea that Picasso regarded any mention of death—above all the death of a great Spaniard—as tantamount to being subjected to the evil eye. When told about this, Isaiah was mortified.
Six weeks later, Picasso returned to Nîmes for the Whitsun bullfight—this time without Jacqueline. She must have been ill. Without a woman on his arm, he seemed a bit forlorn. However, over lunch at the Hôtel du Cheval Blanc, across from the great Roman arena, he perked up. The novillada was expected to be more exciting than usual, thanks to the participation of a suicidally foolhardy Mexican torero. This new young star gratified Picasso by dedicating a bull to him and proceeding to defy death with such daring and elegance that when it was time for the mise-à-mort, the entire arena seemed to hold its collective breath. Our improvised dinner after the Easter bullfight must have pleased Picasso. He asked us to do it again. However, there was a potential problem. A week or two earlier, our neighbor Dora Maar—the mistress Picasso abandoned for Françoise Gilot—had called to ask whether she and her houseguest, James Lord, the young American writer who had attached himself to her—could come and dine and stay that very same night. James had formerly enjoyed Picasso’s favor, but had recently incurred his wrath. Douglas followed Picasso in blowing hot and cold where James was concerned. However, a confrontation between Picasso, Dora, and James was too good an opportunity for mischief to miss, so Douglas agreed to their visit. Picasso turned out to be no less enthusiastic about the encounter. “Tant mieux,” he said with conspiratorial relish, “I haven’t seen her in ages. Don’t let her know I’m coming. It’ll be a nice surprise.”
Picasso, Bullfight, pencil, 1923; formerly in JR collection
Dora Maar in the doorway of her house at Ménerbes, ca. 1954
On the evening in question, Picasso arrived first. With him were Paulo, who was acting as his driver, and Jean Leymarie (later director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris) and his wife. Jean was Picasso’s foremost champion in the French museum world, and one of the few officials for whom he felt affection and respect. The only other guest was an old friend of mine, Richard Buckle, the British ballet critic. In the hour or so before Dora and James arrived, the artist reminisced about Dora—at first affectionately—how the steadfastness of her gaze reflected her intelligence, and how her outré sense of fashion had inspired the surrealistic hats trimmed with fish and fruit and sardine cans that figure in many of his portrayals of her—such a contrast, he said, to the tam-o’-shanter from Hermès that he gave her rival Marie-Thérèse. Hats differentiate the two rivals in his work. Did the craziness of Dora’s hats, by Albouis or Schiaparelli, imply a certain craziness in the sitter? Yes, he thought it did. Despite her poise and sophistication, there was something about Dora that had terrified him. “I left her out of fear. Fear of her madness,” Picasso said. “Dora was mad long before she actually went mad.” True or not, this did not exonerate Picasso. If Dora terrified him, it was surely out of guilt; she held him responsible for her fate.
Picasso chose to blame the Surrealists—not least her previous lover, the erotomaniac Georges Bataille—for the breakdown Dora suffered after he left her. And as if to confirm the extent of her derangement when they first met, he recounted the story of watching her, all alone in the Café des Deux Magots, playing a kind of Russian roulette. After taking off her black gloves, Dora had placed her left hand on the café table, and proceeded to stab away with a penknife at the spaces between her outstretched fingers. Every so often she missed and nicked a finger (the real object of the game, Picasso said) and began to bleed badly. According to Françoise Gilot, who wrote about this masochistic incident in her memoirs, this is “what made up [Picasso’s] mind to interest himself in her. He was fascinated.” He asked Dora to give him the black gloves and kept them in a vitrine.
Picasso, Weeping Woman, etching, aquatint, drypoint, 1937
As for the religious mania that afflicted Dora after their breakup, Picasso told us that she had always had a mystical, occult streak—“at one point she had even taken up Buddhism”—but that until her breakdown she had had little or no sympathy for Catholicism. She associated it with the pious mother she loathed. According to Picasso, her rebirth as a manic Catholic in the course of her 1947 collapse had been the saving of Dora. After shock treatments had done more harm than good, Jacques Lacan, who had taken over her case at Picasso’s request, apparently used her religious mania as a bridge back to sanity. Dora was now, to all intents and purposes, cured. To Picasso the transformation of his pleureuse into a penitent Magdalene was only fitting.
What was Dora up to with James Lord, Picasso asked. Douglas was predictably scathing. The year before, he had been very favorably disposed toward James for setting up a committee to purchase Cézanne’s studio at Aix-en-Provence, but he had, typically, turned against him when he brought this project to an extremely successful conclusion. Douglas was also jealous of James’s burgeoning friendship with Dora; his friends had no right to prefer each other to him. For his part, Picasso claimed to be outraged at Dora’s “romance” with James. Although ten years had passed since he abandoned her, the artist still regarded Dora as his property and was horrified that she should allow herself to be courted by someone else, above all someone who had courted him.
James Lord and Dora at the Mas Saint-Bernard, ca. 1952
Gertrude Stein was indirectly responsible for his friendship with James, Picasso said. She maintained that the innocence and simplicity that had been the hallmark of the doughboys of World War I had been inherited by the GIs of World War II. Get to know one, she had told Picasso. And as if by magic, James had materialized and become something of a fixture. He had grown to like James, Picasso said, although he was anything but une âme simple as he had been led to expect. However, it was fun to have a human pet around, and he described how James would curl up in a corner of the room and go to sleep like a dog. When called, he would jump up and beg—not for a bone, but for an illustrated book or a drawing of himself. Wagging his tail at Dora was never going to work, Picasso said. She was too intelligent not to realize that he was using her as a proxy for him. Picasso did not believe for a moment that they were having an affair. “James doesn’t like women, and the only man Dora really loves is God, mais on verra…” The noise of a car drawing up announced that Dora and James had arrived.
In his self-revelatory book, Picasso and Dora, James has given a riveting account of this evening based on his diaries. The evening was indeed memorable; it was the last time Picasso would see this woman who had been his tragic muse, the personification of Guernica, and the subject of his most anguished portraits—also the only one of his wives or mistresses whose temperament and imagination had been on the same mystical wavelength as his own. James’s account tallies with notes I made at the time. The only difference, we were prepared for Picasso’s onslaught, whereas poor James wasn’t. Douglas did what he could to stir things up. I, on the other hand, sympathized with James’s plight and did what I could to play things down. And then all of a sudden Picasso denounced James for daring to praise some genteel sketches he had seen by Boudin, though in reality for consorting with a woman who had the brand of his ownership upon her. This was my first, and I am glad to say my last, exposure to Picasso’s icy wrath. Dora fared little better than James. It must have been torture for her to spend an evening with the man who had abandoned her and yet continued to treat her as if she belonged to him. I watched her as closely as politeness allowed and concluded that it was pride, bolstered probably by her newfound faith, that protected Dora throughout this unnerving evening—protected her not so much from Picasso’s petulant barbs (“When are you two going to get married?”) as from the mockingly affectionate looks he shot at her as if to reignite old ashes. It was pride, too, that prevented Dora from breaking down and giving Picasso the frisson of seeing her once again as his weeping woman. And if Picasso’s humiliation of James had not already done in their amitié amoureuse, her pride would see to that. After dinner, Picasso abruptly drove off, leaving Dora shattered and James’s regard for his former hero reduced to umbrage.
Dinner at Castille, ca. 1955: Picasso, DC, JR, Jacqueline
Dinner at Castille: clockwise from left, Zette Leiris, unidentified woman, Lauretta Hugo, JR (behind candle), DC (at head of table), Picasso, Francine Weisweiller, Cocteau, Michel Leiris, unidentified woman, Jean Hugo (back to camera)
Some three years later, James brought his relationship with Picasso to a dramatic conclusion. One morning early in November 1956, Picasso called Castille in a black rage. He told us he had just received a long letter from James, challenging him, as a key member of the Communist Party, to repudiate the party line and come out publicly against the Russian invasion of Hungary. “Can the painter of Guernica remain indifferent to the martyrdom of Hungary?” sets the tone of James’s letter. If Picasso failed to do this, James threatened to turn his letter over to the press—“Very close to blackmail,” as he admits in his book Picasso and Dora, “and not a course of which to be proud, but I felt then, and still feel, that both Picasso and the circumstances deserved strong medicine.”
“How dare James set himself up as a man of principles?” Picasso asked. “Where has he been hiding them all this time? All he wants is his name in the papers, and to this end he will endanger the efforts that some of us in the party are making to draft a manifesto against Soviet repression.” Would Douglas intervene and persuade James to withdraw his letter? I begged Douglas to act as a peacemaker rather than a warmonger, but he was not going to forgo the pleasure of acting as Picasso’s enforcer. By calling up James and shrieking “You filthy little shit!” at him, he made things much, much worse. As James rightly said, Picasso “showed extraordinary lack of judgment in choosing this particular emissary. If he himself had called and asked me to desist, I would have found it impossible to refuse.”
A week later, James’s letter appeared in Combat and caused a small stir. Five days later, the document that Picasso had told us about—it called for a special congress at which the issues could be debated—was leaked to Le Monde. Although signed by Picasso and nine intellectuals, it was too equivocal to attract much attention, let alone have any impact on the situation. As he had expected, James was anathematized by Picasso, but he was upset to find himself scolded by his other hero, Giacometti, and dropped by his good friend Jean Cocteau for publishing this letter. I shared his horror at the Russian invasion of Hungary but felt that James had put himself in a very invidious position. He had rounded on Picasso, who had done so much for him, and played into the hands of the artist’s reactionary detractors.
Dora and Marie-Laure at the Mas Saint-Bernard, ca. 1953
Before Christmas, we left for Paris. Douglas had to pick up a new Citroën; I had to work on an interview with Braque. We saw a lot of Marie-Laure de Noailles, and had an occasional glimpse of her exquisitely courteous husband, the Vicomte Charles. Years before, the Chavchavadzes had taken me to see the Noailles’ vast, treasure-filled hôtel particulier on the Place des États-Unis, which Marie-Laure had inherited from her immensely rich banker-industrialist father, Maurice Bischoffsheim, and I had been dazzled. Virtually every painting was of exceptional quality and interest. Besides Goya’s incomparable portraits of his son and daughter-in-law, a Rubens sketch, a fine Bonington, and Géricault’s delectable triple row of horses’ rumps, the hexagonal downstairs library contained Picasso’s big bland portrait drawing of Marie-Laure, which does little justice either to the sitter or the artist. Tables glittered with objets de vertu and gold boxes, most of which would later vanish in a burglary. Beyond this library were Marie-Laure’s cozy, cluttered quarters, filled with a little girl’s collection of “treasures”: ex-votos, photographs of bullfighters, fetishes and miscellaneous mementos. In the entrance hall, mammoth narwhal tusks held up by tasseled ropes jutted out at the great staircase, which was hung with Picasso’s monumental 1908 Nude, Juan Gris’s cubist version of a portrait of Madame Cézanne, one of Chirico’s “metaphysical” still lifes, and a masterpiece by Burne-Jones—in those days considered the epitome of kitsch. The large ballroom, all rococo gilt and mirrors, was still occasionally used for concerts by musical boyfriends or fancy dress parties of utmost splendor and little mirth, whose only purpose was to give members of le tout Paris a chance to preen in public and make epicene fools of one another and themselves. The upstairs salon had been done over in the mid-thirties by that influential decorator Jean-Michel Franck. The walls were covered in great squares of creamy parchment, which resembled blocks of soft masonry, and were hung with surrealist masterpieces—Dalís, Ernsts, Mirós—and one or two daubs by ex-lovers. Tables were stacked with éditions de luxe and musical scores. Dotted around were some of Balthus’s powerful little drawings for Wuthering Heights.
The upstairs salon, decorated by Jean-Michel Franck, in the Noailles’ Paris house. Dalí’s The Old Age of William Tell is over the fireplace.
One evening Marie-Laure gave a dinner for Marcel Duchamp, whose laid-back brilliance and wit and lack of pretension took me by surprise. Marie-Laure was in fine fettle. Earlier in the day, she had attended the funeral of Jacques Fath, the flamboyant fashion designer, and she regaled us with stories of a farcical mix-up over the flowers. Wreaths intended for the bier of an old lady whose funeral was scheduled for the same day had landed up on Fath’s coffin, emblazoned with the words “À notre tante adorée.” The other dinner guests included Cocteau, Giacometti, and Dora Maar. Dora had turned back into the semblance of a worldly Parisienne. But there was no sign of James Lord. Marie-Laure told us that on the eve of his return to America, he had broken his ankle and spent two weeks in hospital. He was recuperating at Aix-en-Provence before taking a boat to New York. Dora, as Douglas had predicted, no longer saw him.
After dinner, Marie-Laure took us off to the opening of a Derain retrospective. For accepting an official invitation to visit Germany during the war, Derain had been denounced as a collaborator. However, he had recently died; hence this commemorative retrospective, the first official recognition of his work in years. One of his few champions was Giacometti, who vehemently defended him against charges of collaborationism. Giacometti had less success defending Derain’s later work against Douglas’s contention that this artist had sold out to a bourgeois public and had been cooking up saccharine confections, like his suburban pastry cook of a father, ever since. “Alberto, it’s so bad.” “Maybe that’s why I like it,” Giacometti said.
Meanwhile, Marie-Laure, who had consumed more champagne than usual, was stirring up trouble as only she knew how. Her racé Faubourg St.-Germain squawk got louder and louder. “Nothing but collaborators and denunciators here,” she said as she positioned herself strategically next to the American-born Marquise de Polignac, who had been accused of fraternizing with the Germans. And then she started on people who claimed to have hidden parachutists and resistance workers in their attics. To believe her, they did so in expectation of a sexual quid pro quo. “You can be sure they would have denied shelter to a nice old Jew.” Considering that Marie-Laure was a quarter Jewish and had had an affair with an Austrian officer, which would have made for terrible trouble if it had not been hushed up, she would have been wiser to keep her thoughts to herself.
Before returning to Castille, we went to see Dora, who told us that she had not been seeing James. She had not visited him in hospital; she had not replied to a long, reproachful letter that he later reprinted in his book about their relationship. Dora sent us a souvenir of her traumatic evening at Castille: a hand-painted Christmas card of a stump of a candle guttering with an eerie little flame. She also gave each of us a charming pencil drawing of herself by Picasso. Although she had inscribed the mount Pour John and Pour Douglas, this did not stop Douglas from keeping both of them. Dora also gave us several examples of her own recent work: sad, romantic views of the garrigue, slashed on with the palette knife. In return, Douglas wrote the foreword to an exhibition of them at Berggruen’s gallery. Douglas was surprised to receive a letter from James, inviting himself to come and recuperate at Castille. He and his friend Bernard Minoret—a writer of singular erudition who is now an éminence grise in the intellectual and social life of Paris—went to stay at Aix-en-Provence instead.
Picasso, Double Portrait of Dora Maar, pencil, 1941. Given to DC and JR by Dora Maar; the left one was inscribed “pour Douglas” and the right one “pour John.” DC kept both.
In 1958, Picasso allowed Douglas to do a facsimile edition of a sketchbook belonging to Dora, one that dates from the summer of 1906, when he shut himself away with his first love, Fernande Olivier, at Gósol, high in the Pyrenees. Le Carnet Catalan, it is called, and the quality of it pleased the artist. “Let’s do another one,” he said. “Next time you go to Paris, ask Dora to show you the Facteur Cheval sketchbook; it would be perfect—never reproduced.” A few weeks later, Douglas and I were in Paris, so we called on Dora. She, too, had been delighted with the Carnet Catalan, but when we asked to see the Facteur Cheval sketchbook, she burst into tears. She couldn’t possibly show it to us, she said; she refused to tell us why. Back in Cannes, a few days later, we reported to Picasso what had happened. He chuckled—“I suspected that might be her reaction”—and went and called Dora and, in a voice of ice, insisted that she show us the sketchbook.
Back we went to see Dora. She looked utterly humiliated. The handsome drawings in the sketchbook laid out on her worktable turned out to be bawdy but hardly offensive. They constituted what the Spaniards call an Alleluja, a kind of comic strip such as Picasso used to do as a child. The carnet told a story: the daily round of Ferdinand Cheval—the “Douanier Rousseau of architecture.” This eccentric postman from Hauterives, a village in the Rhône Valley near Vienne, spent his spare time building a naif folly, the Palais Idéal, which was much admired by the Surrealists. In a pun on the postman’s name, Picasso transforms Cheval into a centaur, with either the torso or the head of a man, or the head of a carrier pigeon grafted onto the body and legs of a horse. He wears a postman’s képi, carries a mailbag, and has PTT (the initials of the French postal service) branded on his flanks. He also boasts a lengthy penis, with which he pleasures the housewives as he delivers their mail. If I remember rightly, the phallic joke extends to the finials on the postman’s folly. The sketchbook is dated August 7, 1937. Picasso and Dora had recently visited the Palais Idéal with Paul Eluard.
The Facteur Cheval and his wife in front of the Palais Idéal, his folly at Hauterives in the Rhône Valley
Picasso, two surviving pages from the Facteur Cheval sketchbook, black chalk, 1937
As we went through the carnet, we could not help noticing that there was a very different set of drawings on the back of the pages, and that poor Dora was becoming more and more agitated at our seeing them. When we turned the sketchbook around to examine the verso, she started to sob—“the brute, how could he torture me like this?”—and she went on sobbing as we perused Picasso’s exquisitely delicate views of her crotch, fore and aft, all too evidently done from life. There was no possibility, in those days at least, of publishing drawings as graphic as this. All Picasso wanted, in his sadistic way, was to assert his rights over Dora and turn her back into a tearful victim. “So she cried?” he said with a terrible predatoriness, when we described what had transpired. “Serve her right for being so pudique. She never used to be like that.” I feared that Dora might have done away with the sketchbook. It did not figure in the posthumous sale of her effects in 1998. However, it eventually surfaced and was included in a subsequent sale. Many of the more explicit drawings are missing—presumably destroyed.
For the next forty years or so I remained in touch with Dora—often by telephone. Toward the end she shut herself away—out of vanity as much as reclusiveness. Osteoporosis had left her figure bowed and shrunken, and she, who had set so much store by her looks and appearance, did not want friends to see her so impaired. Besides, if she did see people she wanted to look presentable, and would spend hours maneuvering her old bones into a vintage Chanel suit. Another reason for discouraging visitors: she did not want anybody to see that, like Miss Havisham, she had allowed the once-handsome apartment Picasso had given her to become terribly neglected. The trompe l’oeil insects that Picasso had painted on the walls—Dora reminded him of an insect, he used to say—carried all the more conviction. Picasso had given Dora a great many portraits of herself, some of utmost importance, so she could well have afforded a maid or a nurse. However, even after selling virtually all the more tormented images—she kept back all the more flatteringly lyrical ones—Dora chose to live in self-inflicted penury. Might this have been a form of penance? As Dora aged, her perception of Picasso changed completely. She no longer saw him as the Antichrist who had victimized her, but as the saintly regenerator of modern art. There was an element of truth to both these perceptions.
One mystery I wish I had asked Dora about was the presence of Mein Kampf in the glass-fronted bookcase where she kept the illustrated books Picasso had given her. When I first glimpsed the book, I didn’t attach much importance to it. Many of my antifascist friends owned copies of this loathsome manifesto on the principle that the more you know about your enemy, the better. That Picasso might have owned Mein Kampf would not have surprised me at all. Dora’s possession of the book turned out to be less innocent than I had thought. After her death, a dealer whom I have every reason to trust told me how he had negotiated with her for months and finally persuaded her to sell him some of her own, as opposed to Picasso’s, work. Before signing the agreement, Dora had looked up and asked if he was Jewish. He denied it—for the one and only time in his life, he said. Dora claimed to be very relieved to hear this; she told him she would not have signed the agreement had he been Jewish.
Since Dora had consistently sold her Picassos to Jewish dealers, notably Kahnweiler and Berggruen, I found her attitude extremely puzzling until I remembered that Jacques Lacan, the celebrated psychoanalyst Picasso had put in charge of her case, had seized on Dora’s religious mania as a means to lead her back to sanity. This unorthodox therapy seems to have worked, but it may have opened the door to ideological perversions that were in direct opposition to the ideas and values by which she claimed to live. For instance, in the course of her bizarre journey back to a measure of sanity, Dora may have taken against the Jews for crucifying her Savior. Alternatively, her attitude may have had something to do with the fact that she was often said to be Jewish. When I asked Dora about this, she insisted that in Yugoslavia her father’s name, Markovic, was sometimes but not always Jewish, certainly not in the case of her family. The most probable explanation is that these Hitlerite sympathies were a symptom of Dora’s psychosis. In this respect she reminded me of a great American poet who was periodically institutionalized for manic-depression. In early stages of his attacks, he would carry Mein Kampf around concealed in a dust jacket of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. This was all the odder, given that in his saner moments this poet was antifascist and proud of having some Jewish blood. Dora may have suffered from a similar syndrome.
I will never forget the last time I visited Dora, a year or two before she died: the long wait while she shuffled to the door and struggled with the bolts, and the shock of looking down and seeing her mauvish wig askew and her body so bent and shrunken; and then the relief, when she looked up, that those radiant eyes still seemed to send forth the rays that Picasso had endowed them with at the time of their first love. Mentally, Dora was lucid, so long as one stayed away from religion. On this occasion, Dora told me that she was leaving everything she had to a monastery in Paris where the monks had been her spiritual advisers. She gave me the names of her lawyers and assured me that her will was in order: since she had no survivors there would be no problems. Poor Dora appears to have been under a delusion. The only will that was found after her death proved to be invalid. As a result genealogists had to be called in. They came up with two very distant cousins, one in France and one in Yugoslavia. In October 1998 and May 1999, Dora’s possessions—a mass of works by Picasso, Balthus, and Wifredo Lam, as well as all her own paintings and photographs, books and papers—were auctioned off. What was left after the state had taken over half the proceeds was shared by the heirs Dora never knew and the genealogists who tracked them down, not to mention the lawyers—just what she would most have dreaded.