This Forgotten Picasso Painting Just Emerged From the Shadows for the First Time Since 1944

“Bust of a Woman in a Flowery Hat (Dora Maar),” a poignant portrait of the Spanish artist’s lover and muse, had been in private hands for eight decades

Ellen Wexler | Writer and Special Projects Editor

September 24, 2025

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Pablo Picasso created his masterpiece, Guernica, in his Paris studio in 1937. When the Nazis invaded the city three years later, he kept working. In the midst of the occupation, he painted a melancholy portrait of Dora Maar, his lover and most important muse.

An unnamed collector purchased the artwork—titled Bust of a Woman in a Flowery Hat (Dora Maar)—in August 1944, the month of Paris’ liberation. After the sale, the painting disappeared from the public eye.

Few were aware of the portrait’s existence. Some scholars of the Spanish artist knew about it, though they had only black-and-white photos for reference. But now, after more than eight decades, the mysterious masterpiece has finally surfaced from the shadows.

Next month, the grandchildren of the unnamed collector will sell the artwork at the auction house Lucien Paris, which officially unveiled the painting on September 18. It’s expected to fetch more than $9 million.

“To our knowledge, it has never been exhibited nor appeared at auction,” writes Agnès Sevestre-Barbé, a Picasso specialist, in an essay published by the auction house. “Suffice it to say that the rediscovery of this work is an event.”

Picasso met Maar around 1935, when he was 54 and she was 28. At the time, he was stuck in a creative rut; Maar, a French Surrealist artist, was flourishing. They began a fraught nine-year relationship that would change the course of both of their careers. For instance, scholars think she encouraged him to create his most famous work, Guernica, a 25-foot-long anti-war oil painting produced in the wake of a bombing during the Spanish Civil War.

“He had never entered political painting before,” Amar Singh, who curated a recent exhibition of Maar’s photography, told the Guardian’s Donna Ferguson in 2024. “I don’t think Guernica would have existed without Dora Maar.”

Picasso also painted dozens of portraits of Maar. The most famous, Weeping Woman, dates to the same year as Guernica, and it’s been interpreted as both a depiction of Maar’s particular despair and a broader representation of wartime suffering. His subject, for her part, disparaged these artworks. “All his portraits of me are lies,” she later insisted. “They’re all Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar.”

In Bust of a Woman in a Flowery Hat (Dora Maar), Picasso depicts Maar in a fragmented canvas full of blues, greens and reds. Although this artwork doesn’t evoke the intense distress of Weeping Woman, it depicts a more tempered anguish. The mouth “perhaps hints at the shadow of a faint, sorrowful smile,” writes Sevestre-Barbé.

Picasso completed the portrait on July 11, 1943—two months after he met Françoise Gilot, 21, for whom he would leave Maar shortly after. The piece represents “a moment of transition,” writes auctioneer Christophe Lucien in an essay. “Dora remains the model, yet already she is the companion about to be left behind.”

Like Weeping Woman, the portrait reflects forces both personal and political. In addition to the end of Picasso and Maar’s tumultuous affair, the painting’s melancholy tone may have been influenced by the presence of the Nazis, who viewed Picasso as a “degenerate” artist. “Picasso probably was worried that he would never be able to sell or exhibit again,” Arthur Brand, a Dutch art historian known for recovering stolen paintings, tells CNN’s Billy Stockwell. “Maybe his own sadness is also reflected in this painting.”

Measuring about 31 by 24 inches, the portrait bears Picasso’s signature in the upper-left corner of the canvas. The auction will take place on October 24, and the painting will go on public display for three days ahead of the sale.

Ellen Wexler | | Read More

Ellen Wexler is a staff writer and special projects editor, digital, for Smithsonian magazine.