By March 1944, Paris had been under German occupation for nearly four years. The city lived in a state of tense anticipation. Everyone sensed that a major Allied invasion was imminent – but no one knew exactly when or where it would begin.
For Picasso, this was a period of quiet resistance and personal upheaval. He had turned down multiple opportunities to leave, choosing instead to remain in occupied Paris. Daily life was defined by scarcity, yet his artistic output remained prolific.
Romantically, he found himself suspended between the end of one relationship and the beginning of another. His companion during these years was Dora Maar – a brilliant Surrealist photographer, politically engaged, and his intellectual equal. She became the face of his wartime suffering, most notably in the Weeping Woman series. Yet by 1944, their relationship had begun to unravel – strained by the pressures of war and Picasso’s growing attachment to a new muse.
In Christie’s upcoming evening sale in Hong Kong, one of Picasso’s portraits of Maar from this turbulent period – Buste de femme, painted on 5 March 1944 – will be offered as a leading highlight, with an estimate between HK$86 and 106 million (US$11–14 million). Presented after more than 25 years in private hands, it is one of the largest and most significant of Picasso’s portraits of Dora Maar to come to auction in recent years.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) | Buste de femme, oil on canvas
Painted on 5 March 1944
80.8 x 65 cm
Estimate: HK$86,000,000 - 106,000,000 (US$11 - 14 million)
Auction House: Christie's Hong Kong
Sale: 20th/21st Century Evening Sale
Date: 26 September 2025
When German forces entered Paris in June 1940, Picasso had the means to escape. Mexico and the United States were both options, but he made the deliberate choice to stay. He returned to his studio, where he would remain throughout the war – working, receiving visitors, and living under constant surveillance.
His art was officially banned by the occupying regime, labelled entartete Kunst – degenerate art – by Nazi authorities. Though his international fame shielded him from outright persecution, he was forbidden from exhibiting and closely watched by the Gestapo.
Despite the cold and the rationing, Picasso worked steadily, often wrapped in layers of clothing, painting with unrelenting vigour through the atrocities unfolding around him. The studio became a place of quiet defiance, as well as a gathering point for the city’s intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Paul Éluard.
Camus (with dog) in Picasso's studio with Sartre, de Beauvoir, Maar, and the artist himself on 19 March 1944
Pablo Picasso | Weeping Woman (1937) | Tate, London
During these war years, Dora Maar was Picasso’s lover, muse, and creative partner. According to legend, their formal introduction took place at the Parisian café Le Deux Magots in the spring of 1936, when Maar was playing a risky game – stabbing a knife between her gloved fingers. She cut herself, and Picasso kept the bloodied glove as a souvenir.
Their affair began just as civil war broke out in Spain, and the emotional intensity of the time found its way into Picasso’s work. Maar’s anguished presence became a visual cipher for both political unrest and personal turmoil.
He depicted her through fractured forms, acidic colours, and psychologically charged compositions; she documented the creation of Guernica. Together, they studied printing techniques with Man Ray and experimented with ways of combining photography and painting.
Dora Maar | Photo: Man Ray
Picasso and Dora Maar
Their creative partnership had produced some of Picasso’s most emotionally charged works – yet by the time he painted Buste de femme, it was nearing its end.
The atmosphere in Paris was tense but tinged with hope: deprivation was rampant, and the threat of deportation remained a constant reality. In February, two of Picasso’s close friends – the poets Robert Desnos and Max Jacob – were arrested and deported.
His relationship with Maar had grown strained under the weight of war – and in part due to her jealousy over Picasso’s ongoing involvement with his former muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, with whom he had a daughter. The arrival of a new romantic interest, the young painter Françoise Gilot, in 1943, only deepened the divide.
Buste de femme
With its dramatic tension, vivid contrasts, and bold fragmentation, Buste de femme captures the emotional and psychological depth of their complex relationship. Maar is shown in a wide-eyed yet magisterial pose, rendered in striking black, white, vivid red, and green, and wearing her signature headwear – a playful detail that often distinguishes her from Picasso’s other subjects.
In this work, Picasso employs the device of the double profile. Whereas in earlier portraits he combined profile and frontal views, here he presents three points of view simultaneously: left profile, right profile, and full face – all superimposed to create a single, multifaceted image. Dora’s face appears intense but strangely impassive, while her scarlet dress and jet-black hair reinforce the painting’s undercurrents of violence and emotional fracture.
Pablo Picasso | Buste de femme, painted on 5 May 1944 | 81 x 65 cm | Tate Modern, London
Pablo Picasso | Woman in Hat with Flowers, painted on 6 March 1944 | 81 x 65 cm | The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Pablo Picasso | Femme Accroupie | Sold: HK$191 million, 2021
Measuring 81 x 65 cm, the work closely relates to another Buste de femme of the same year, now housed at Tate Modern. That version, of identical dimensions, was vandalised in 2020 and carried an estimated value of £20 million at the time.
The work now going to auction was previously exhibited in Hong Kong in 2010 by Seoul Auction, though it was offered privately rather than at public sale. In recent years, it has been on view at the Gana Art Center in Seoul, operated by Seoul Auction’s parent company, Gana Art Gallery.
The current record for a Picasso painting sold in Asia was set in 2021, when Femme accroupie – a portrait of Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s final wife – sold for HK$191 million.