Dora Maar
"I want to create an aura of mystery about my work. People must long to see it."
“She really deserves to be known. We owe her that justice.” -Victoria Combalia
Dora Maar, born Henrietta Theodora Markovitch, was a strong-willed, passionate artist who worked in both photography and painting during her decades-long career. Much of her work has been eclipsed by her role of muse/mistress to Pablo Picasso, who labelled her Weeping Woman and painted her many times. But, as Maar once said, “all Picasso's portraits of me are lies. They're all Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar.”
Here, I want to share works that are unequivocally Dora Maar.
In 1930, supported by her father, a 23-year old Dora Maar opened a photography studio in Paris where she worked with Pierre Kéfer to create photographic advertisements. Her commercial work brought in quick success and introduced her to photographers Brassaï and Louis-Victor Emmanuel Sougez who noted her instinctively surrealist style and curious persona.
Maar used mirrors, camera tricks, collage, and deformation to play with the possibilities of perception, making everyday objects into something extraordinary. Within 5 years, she was accepted into the notoriously sexist Surrealists; with their validation, she pushed her creativity further into the gothic and the mystical, creating some of the most fascinating photographs of the movement.
But Maar was much more than another surrealist, she was also gifted with an eye for street photography, capturing the highs, and especially the lows, of society. The connection she felt to disadvantaged people gave her a significant desire for social reform, joining many activist groups and fighting against fascism. Her intense empathy for the disadvantaged became misconstrued as despair, but that didn’t stop her. She even pushed Picasso to paint Guernica as a political statement, informing people of the horrors that the impoverished were subjected to.
After surviving a tumultuous relationship with Picasso and a nervous breakdown, Maar turned to painting as an additional source of creative expression. In the later years of her life, she churned out emotive, abstract landscapes that capture the push and pull of energy in the world around her.
Maar didn’t abandon photography, as it is widely believed, but she definitely favored painting and photograms towards the end of her life. In her photograms, she would scratch and collage on top of negatives to create abstract compositions. Occasionally she added to her own negatives from her early career — almost as if she wanted to collaborate with her past self, a version of her that she had to leave behind as she grew older.
In Woman with Hands in Hair, the negative was captured in 1935 but the brilliant white scratching was done in the 1980s. The brush strokes resemble that of her landscapes, and the erotic pose of the woman lying underneath contains the same haunting eroticism of her early work. It’s hard for me to pick a favorite work from Maar, but this might be it. It reads to me as a beautiful, intimate conversation between Dora, the painter, and Dora, the photographer. She had a full life, a life of passion and pain, of joy and despair, and through it all, her art was there for her as a constant friend.
Gorgeous! I adore Dora Maar's work 🥰😎