Reframing Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar in Grace Nicols’s ‘Weeping Woman

Abstract

The Guyanese poet Grace Nichols’s ekphrastic poem “Weeping Woman” in her Picasso, I Want My Face Back challenges Pablo Picasso’s iconic status in twentieth-century art. Written in the form of a dramatic monologue, the poem gives voice to Picasso’s model, muse and lover, Dora Maar, who was a Surrealist photographer before she had an affair with Picasso. Unlike traditional ekphrastic poems which involve the description of a fixed, silenced and gazed beautiful image through a male persona who is also a gazer of that image in poetry, Nichols transforms Maar’s objectified position in Picasso’s painting into a subject by voicing her critique of the artist’s cubist art, his use of colors as well as his geometric figures, and of his maltreatment of her. Through this ekphrastic stance, Maar reconstructs her identity as a photographer and rids herself from the artist’s domination over her in his art and personal life. Hence, the aim of this article is to discuss in what ways Nichols’s poem problematizes the privileged status of the male artist over his silenced female model and acknowledges the artistic talent of the woman through the use of ekphrasis.