Greece’s Little Picasso Problem Is Now a Kind of Triumph
The big news is that ‘Woman’s Head’ is even on public display, because for a decade and until quite recently it was in a thief’s grasp.
ATHENS — “Is Dora Maar around here somewhere?” I asked a security guard standing two floors beneath the glassy entrance atrium of the new National Gallery at Athens. When I saw the faint outline of a grin break out from behind the guard’s mask and heard the lightly accented reply, “Sir, she is right behind you,” I was both mortified and thrilled.
My first impression of Dora Maar came not from a museum but a big screen, thanks to her depiction in Alan Rudolph’s mostly forgotten film “The Moderns.” The 1988 movie was a sumptuous aperçu of 1926 Paris, and the vision of Pablo Picasso’s famed flame and muse acting like a boss in a smoky, if imagined, Left Bank café fired up in me an irrational passion for Paris. That eventually burned itself out, but it’s funny how in a split second a single, small painting can bring everything back.
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