Picasso, Guernica, and the Women Who Made It Happen: Mougins 1936-37

Jun 20, 2025
8 min read

Updated: 7 days ago

Vintage collage: a woman in sunlight, a group under palm trees, friends picnicking, and three women napping on a bench. Relaxed, carefree atmosphere.

In the spring of 1937, while Pablo Picasso was spending lazy afternoons on the beaches of the French Riviera, German bombers were practising on a small Basque town called Guernica. The news filtered south through the heat. Within days, Picasso had scrapped the mural he'd been commissioned to paint for the Paris World Exposition and begun sketching something new: a 25-foot canvas of screaming horses, broken bodies, and a single light bulb burning over the ruins. The painting that would define the century was conceived in the same weeks he was swimming at La Garoupe with Man Ray, Dora Maar, and Lee Miller.

The two summers Picasso spent at the Hotel Vaste Horizon in Mougins, 1936 and 1937, are usually described as a footnote: a sun-drenched interlude before the war closed in. But look more carefully and the footnote becomes the story. Mougins is where Dora Maar began the most important documentary photography of her career. It's where Lee Miller captured the images that are now the primary visual record of those summers. And it's where a dancer from Guadeloupe appeared in a fashion magazine and made history without anyone noticing for eighty years. Picasso was there. He was also, in many ways, the least interesting person in the room.

Five people relax outdoors at a picnic, sitting on blankets around a table with bowls and glasses. The setting is sunny with trees in view. — Picnic at Mougins, Nusch and Paul Eluard, Roland Penrose, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin, Lee Miller, Mougins, 1937

The Hotel and the Circle

The Vaste Horizon was not the kind of place you'd associate with Europe's most famous painter. It was a modest boarding house in the tangled lanes of Mougins' old town, nothing like the Grand Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc that drew wealthy tourists to the coast. Its charm was its informality: small rooms, shaded courtyards, and no particular reason to behave. Year on year, a circle of radical painters, photographers, and poets gathered there to pursue what Man Ray described as 'the dual rituals of creative invention and pleasurable excess.'

Among them were Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, the photographer Dora Maar, Max Ernst, the painter Leonora Carrington, poet Paul Éluard and his wife Nusch, and the photographer and photojournalist Lee Miller, who arrived with her future husband Roland Penrose. They brought canvases, cameras, and poetry notebooks, and a shared conviction that life and art were inseparable. The villagers of Mougins peered from doorways and drew their own conclusions.

Picasso, restless as ever, set to work on the walls of his rented room almost immediately, covering them with a fresco. The hotel owner had it painted over in plain white the following morning. It's one of the more clarifying details of those summers: one of the most valuable painters alive covering a wall with original work, and a practical innkeeper with a bucket of whitewash deciding that wasn't his problem.

Two women in patterned dresses relax against a sunny wall. One stands with hands on hips, the other sits, eyes closed, enjoying the sun. — Lee Miller and Nusch Éluard in Mougins © Lee Miller Archives

Dora Maar: The Photographer Who Documented Guernica

Dora Maar is still most commonly described as Picasso's muse and mistress. That framing would have annoyed her when she was alive, and it should annoy us now. Her real name was Henriette Theodora Marković, she was born in Paris in 1907, and she was one of the most technically accomplished photographers working in France in the 1930s. Her Surrealist work, including her famous Portrait d'Ubu, was admired by Man Ray, André Breton, and Paul Éluard. She was also a committed anti-fascist and a serious political thinker. The relationship with Picasso, which began at Mougins in the summer of 1936, tends to swallow all of that.

In May 1937, with the news of Guernica's bombing still raw, Picasso began painting the mural that would become his most significant work. He worked in his studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris. Dora Maar arrived on 11 May with her camera and a commission from the art journal Cahiers d'art to document the process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DlKtjJvUko

Between 11 May and 4 June 1937, she photographed the entire creation of Guernica in eight distinct stages, producing 28 photographs that remain the definitive visual record of how the painting evolved. The technical challenges were considerable: the canvas measured 25 feet by 12 feet, the studio was poorly lit, and Picasso worked by spotlight, which moved across the canvas as he painted, distorting exposures. Maar compensated by cutting and rearranging sections from multiple shots in the darkroom, using photomontage to produce accurate composite images of each stage.

Those photographs did more than document. Art historian T.J. Clark has written that Picasso consulted Maar's retouched prints during the painting process itself, using them to assess the composition at scale. There is a persuasive scholarly argument that the tonal contrasts in Maar's photographs directly influenced Picasso's decision to paint Guernica in black, white, and grey. The palette that makes the painting look like a news photograph of devastation may have originated in Dora Maar's darkroom. The Centre Pompidou acquired Maar's original negatives around the turn of the century. They are among the most important photographic documents in the collection.

After her relationship with Picasso ended in 1943, Maar retreated progressively from the art world. She took up painting, then largely stopped. She withdrew from public life in the 1960s and spent her later decades in increasing isolation. She died in 1997. A major retrospective at the Musée Picasso in Paris in 2019 finally gave her work the sustained critical attention it deserved. It came 22 years after her death.

Lee Miller: The Camera That Went Everywhere

Lee Miller arrived at Mougins having already lived several lives. She'd been a Vogue model in New York, Man Ray's lover and collaborator in Paris (where they co-invented the solarisation technique), and was now rebuilding herself as a photographer in her own right, with Penrose as her partner and the whole of the Riviera as her subject.

A person stands against a textured wall, holding a washboard in front, casting a shadow. The mood is serene, with a vintage feel. — Ady Fidelin © Man Ray 2015 Trust

Her photographs from the Mougins summers are now the primary visual record of those weeks: the famous picnic on the beach at Antibes with Nusch Éluard, Paul Éluard, Roland Penrose, Man Ray, and Ady Fidelin; the candid shots at La Garoupe; the group portraits outside the Hotel Vaste Horizon. She photographed with an instinct for the unguarded moment that set her apart from the posed studio work that dominated the period.

The woman visible in a swimsuit on a beach at Antibes, squinting into the sun, would go on to photograph the liberation of Dachau, the bodies in the ovens at Buchenwald, and the ruins of Munich in 1945. She is one of the most important photojournalists of the 20th century. Her full story is one worth reading in detail. What the Mougins photographs show is where she was just before everything changed.

Ady Fidelin: The Woman History Forgot

Of everyone who gathered at Mougins, Ady Fidelin has been most completely erased from the record. She was born Adrienne Fidelin in 1915 in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, and moved to France after a catastrophic hurricane struck the island in 1928. She became a dancer in Paris, and met Man Ray on a beach at Antibes in the summer of 1936.

A collage of 12 vintage black-and-white photos featuring people relaxing on a beach, posing, and chatting by cars and in nature, with handwritten notes. — © Lee Miller Archives

She appears in nearly 400 of Man Ray's photographs from the period. She was part of both Mougins summers, present in the group photographs Lee Miller took, and identifiable in at least one Picasso painting from the era. Man Ray called her his 'little black sun' and described their relationship with a candour that revealed more about him than he perhaps intended: 'She stops me from sinking into pessimism. She does everything: shining my shoes, making me breakfast, and painting the backdrops on my large canvases.'

In the September 1937 issue of Harper's Bazaar, a full-page portrait of Fidelin taken by Man Ray appeared in a spread titled 'The Bushongo of Africa Sends Its Hats to Paris.' It made her, inadvertently, the first Black woman to appear in a major American fashion magazine. The image appeared in segregated America in 1937, which is the measure of its significance. It also dressed her as a representative of an Africa she had no personal connection to, framing her beauty through the same colonial lens that Surrealism was never quite radical enough to put down.

Three women in swimsuits and hats stand on a sunny beach. One adjusts her hat. They wear patterned skirts, with ocean waves in the background. — Ady, Dora and Nusch, by Man Ray via Centre Pompidou

When Man Ray returned to America after the war, Fidelin remained in France. She never found her way back into the circles that had briefly made her visible. She died in 2004 in an assisted care facility far from Paris. The New York Times ran an 'Overlooked' obituary eighteen years later, in 2022. She is played by Zita Hanrot in the 2023 biographical film Lee, about Lee Miller, which is the most mainstream attention her story has yet received.

The Rhythm of the Days

Away from all of that, the days had a simple rhythm. Every morning the group drove down from Mougins to La Garoupe, the sandy cove at Antibes where artists and aristocrats bronzed themselves on striped deck chairs and argued about aesthetics between swims. By dusk they migrated to the local bars and fish restaurants, where the evenings ran long on cheap Provençal wine. It was a life of genuine pleasure pursued by people who were also doing serious work, which is a harder combination to sustain than it sounds.

Four people stand close together outside a building with shutters, wearing summer clothing. The mood is relaxed and amiable. — Ady Fidelin, Lee Miller, Picasso and Nusch Éluard at the Hotel Vaste Horizon © Roland Penrose

Paul Éluard and Nusch completed the inner circle. Their marriage accommodated Man Ray's camera and Picasso's brush with what appeared to be genuine equanimity. Picasso painted Nusch repeatedly that summer; Paul wrote poems from her image. Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington orbited the group. Jean Cocteau appeared. The Côte d'Azur in those years attracted an extraordinary concentration of creative energy, and the Vaste Horizon was its informal headquarters for two brief summers.

Beach scene with three people in swimsuits and one in a hat. Woman in the center smokes, ocean waves in the background. Relaxed mood. — Dora Maar, Nusch Eluard, Pablo Picasso and Paul Eluard on the beach September 1937 by Eileen Agar

After the Sun, Shadows

These summers were the last of their kind. The Spanish Civil War was already visible on the horizon in 1936; by 1937, with Guernica bombed and the painting finished, the remaining time was borrowed. When war came in September 1939, the circle scattered across occupied Europe.

Picasso stayed in Paris under occupation. Max Ernst was interned as an enemy alien, then escaped to America. Paul Éluard joined the Resistance. Lee Miller became a war correspondent and photojournalist, following Allied forces across Europe. Leonora Carrington fled to Mexico. Nusch Éluard died suddenly in 1946, of a stroke, at 40. Dora Maar retreated into isolation. Ady Fidelin was left behind as Man Ray went back to America.

Man sitting with a cane, looking at a smiling woman in a headscarf and floral shorts. They're relaxed on a city street, leaning on a pole. — Man Ray and Ady Fidelin Man Ray and Ady Fidelin Mougins France 1937 via

The women whose brilliance lit up those beaches mostly struggled, in the years that followed, to have their work taken on its own terms. Nusch's collages were misattributed to her husband. Maar's photography was framed as secondary to her relationship with Picasso. Lee Miller's photojournalism was largely unknown until her son found thousands of photographs in the attic after her death in 1977. Ady Fidelin was forgotten almost entirely.

Man Ray, in a rare moment of genuine reflection, wrote later: 'It is not a question here of telling you about my life, but of evoking these few fertile weeks in search of pleasure, freedom and creation… how not to remember this past, the insolence of this summer happiness?' The insolence is the right word. They were happy in a place and a moment that couldn't last, making work that has lasted, and mostly giving the credit to the wrong people for the better part of a century.