En la carrera artística picassiana, la máscara se constituye en un objeto que de forma intencionada desestabiliza la identidad del sujeto. El libro analiza el concepto de la máscara desde una perspectiva lacaniana y describe diferentes periodos en la carrera artística de Picasso con el fin de definir, en lo posible, la compleja personalidad del artista.
Pablo Picasso’s continued search for the essential features of perceived objects and his natural abidance to the general principles regulating artistic creation determined his intuitive analysis of the various stages of vision. His exploration of pictorial language is reflected in the well-established periods in the development of Cubism. Progressively, objects were analyzed first by their image (or retinal) and surface (or external) features as viewed from particular observer-oriented viewpoints during the Pre-Cubist and Cézannian Cubist stages; then by viewer-independent, structural features during Analytic Cubism; and finally by categorial features during Synthetic Cubism. This final re-evaluation allowed the artist to treat pictorial language as truly arbitrary, leading to metaphorical correlations between objects that went beyond what was actually depicted on the surface of the canvas.
Although Pablo Picasso spotted Dora Maar at a cafe in January 1936 it is highly likely that she had come to his attention prior. As Brassai, a Hungarian-French photographer, recalled, 'It was at Les Deux-Magots that, one day in autumn 1935, [he] met Dora. On an earlier day, he had already noticed the grave, drawn face of the young woman at a nearby table, the attentive look in her light-colored eyes, sometimes disturbing in its fixity. When Picasso saw her in the same cafe in the company of the surrealist poet Paul Éluard, who knew her, the poet introduced her to Picasso' (Brassai, a.k.a. Gyula Halász, Conversations with Picasso [University of Chicago Press, 1999]). Tinged with a seductive mix of violence and dark eroticism, this first meeting has attained mythical status in the story of the artist's life. It reads like an unreal fantasy. A mysterious and feline beauty, which Man Ray had captured in the pictures he took of her, a companion of Georges Bataille, Dora was an accomplished phot