When I see Sarah Sanders, I think of Dora Maar.
Picasso never made a factual portrait of his muse, the beautiful Surrealist photographer Dora Maar. He didn’t portray her with the lissome, graceful curves he devoted to a previous lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter. Dora was his “weeping woman,” shown simultaneously in profile and full face, with sharply angled features and harsh shadows.
Art, Picasso said, “is an instrument of war…against brutality and darkness.” He may not have been thinking of Dora then, but he was compelled, he said, to render her in “tortured forms … obeying a vision that forced itself on me.”
Sanders has a face like Dora Maar — conflicted, fractured, disjointed, astounding in its asymmetry. Her left eyebrow shoots upward like an arrow above an angry, over-sized eye. The mouth twists in a contemptuous sneer, left corner down, right corner up, somehow out of alignment with her jaw. The right eye is small and squinty, half-hidden by a protruding fat pad beneath her less expressive eyebrow.
Does it reflect a mind at war with itself? Or is it a face failing miserably at disguising contempt for her audience?
Contempt, say social scientists, is the only one of humans’ seven universal facial expressions that is asymmetrical. It conveys a mixture of disgust, anger and superiority. The expression may be as slight as a momentary lift of one corner of the lips. Sanders’ version, when addressing reporters, is the Full Monty — a textbook illustration of the emotion described by philosopher Robert C. Solomon:
“Contempt is a judgement against another person of the most severe nature; it finds him worse than offensive, rather vile or repulsive…. [and]constitutes the other as decidedly inferior, if not as some subhuman creature unworthy of human consideration.”
Do you think I’m cruel? Or misogynistic? No, I am intuitive. I judge people — men and women and especially politicians — on their appearance and expressions. Former EPA head Scott Pruitt used to drive me crazy. I’ve seen more emotion in a glass of milk. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s face makes me want to slap his fleshy jowls, setting them a-jiggle, and wiping away his perennial simper. Worse are the rare images that catch him smiling, expressing the pleasure of a rich man snatching a piggybank from a child.
Picasso painted Dora’s distorted visage into Guernica, his condemnation of war, as one symbol of the tragedy. When I watch Sanders at her podium, I see a reflection of the Administration she serves — dismissive not only of the people before her, but also of the institutions designed to restrain its greedy impulses. If only I were a visual artist, I would paint the “Guernica” of this era in our political history.
For what it’s worth, Dora Maar disavowed the images of her painted by Picasso. “All his portraits of me are lies,” she would say after he abandoned her for another, younger muse. “They are all Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar.”
Which is along the lines of Sanders’ reaction after she was compared at the White House Correspondents Dinner to the manipulative Aunt Lydia in the dystopian Handmaid’s Tale. Aunt Lydia keeps the baby-bearing handmaidens within the constraints of the authoritarian masters of Gilead using whatever psychological tool suits her mood of the moment — lies being at the top of her list — much as Sanders lies to the press in service of the president.
“Every time Sarah steps up to the podium I get excited, because I’m not really sure what we’re going to get,” said comedian Michelle Wolf. “You know — a press briefing, a bunch of lies or divided into softball teams. … I think she’s very resourceful. Like she burns facts, and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye. Like maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.”
“That evening says a whole lot more about her than it does about me,” Sanders said the following week. It’s a line she used again after being asked to leave a restaurant, based on her lies for the Administration. “It bothers me being called a liar. Because one of the few things you have are your integrity and reputation.”
Dora Maar went more than a little crazy after l’affaire Picasso. Her reputation as a photographer was diminished — Picasso had urged her to give up photography and paint in his own Cubist style. She endured a nervous breakdown, eventually undergoing electroshock therapy; became a devout Catholic and spent much of the rest of her life alone, defined by her relationship with a man who used and discarded her, when she ceased to interest or serve him.
Are you listening, Sarah Sanders?
