Dora Maar

Dora Maar (born November 22, 1907, Paris, France—died July 16, 1997, Paris) was a French photographer and Surrealist artist whose career and accomplishments were overshadowed during her lifetime by the details of her affair with Pablo Picasso. Her work was resurrected and reexamined more thoughtfully after her death.

Maar, whose mother was French and father was Croatian, spent her childhood in Buenos Aires, where her father was employed as an architect. She returned to Paris in 1926 and studied art at the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs, the École de Photographie, the Académie Julian, and the atelier of André Lhote. In the early 1930s she began to pursue a career in photography, secured a shared studio with set designer Pierre Kéfer, and adopted the professional name Dora Maar. Her professional and personal network expanded, and she befriended photographers Brassaï and Emmanuel Sougez, among others. In the early years of her career, Maar worked in the fashion and advertising industries. She also photographed street scenes and served as a still photographer on the set for Jean Renoir’s film Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936).

By 1935 Maar was associated with the Surrealist circle and had strong ties to André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Georges Bataille. She photographed many of the Surrealists and exhibited with them. Her work began to take on more of the absurdist and dreamlike qualities characteristic of Surrealism. She made dark photomontages composed of disturbing and ambiguous juxtapositions. Portrait of Ubu (1936; also called Père Ubu), a monstrous close-up image by Maar of what may be an armadillo fetus (she would never confirm), became an icon of the movement.

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Maar and Picasso began a love affair in 1936. She photographed him often, and her pictures of him creating his epic work Guernica became important visual documents related to that painting. Throughout their relationship Picasso painted Maar numerous times (e.g., Dora Maar Seated [1937]; Weeping Woman [1937]; Weeping Woman in a Red Hat [1937]; Woman Seated in a Garden [1938]; Dora Maar in an Armchair [1939]). In the late 1930s Maar returned to painting and painted a portrait of Picasso in the colourful disjointed Cubist style known by then to be his signature (Portrait of Pablo Picasso in a Black Hat [1939]). By 1944 relations between Maar and Picasso were strained, and the two became increasingly estranged. They separated completely in 1946. Maar, meanwhile, exhibited more frequently in the 1940s.

Sometime after she and Picasso broke off their relationship, Maar suffered a nervous breakdown and required psychiatric hospitalization. She underwent electric-shock therapy, but three weeks later, at the request of Éluard—who had remained a close friend to her all those years—she was transferred to the clinic of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who personally oversaw her treatment for the next two years. As she continued to be tormented by Picasso, she turned to Roman Catholicism and mysticism and, though she continued to paint—mostly still lifes and landscapes—and to photograph, she became a recluse. Over the years, as her main source of income, she sold what she owned that had been made by Picasso.

Maar did not exhibit at all for nearly 25 years. Her work was reintroduced in 1990 with “Dora Maar: Oeuvres Anciennes,” an exhibition of her photographs and paintings at Marcel Fleiss’s Galerie 1900–2000 in Paris. A major exhibition followed in 1995 in Valencia, Spain. After her death in 1997, the contents of her homes in Paris and in Ménerbes (France), which among other things included her own works and those by Picasso, were auctioned off. Since Maar’s death, her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, and it has been the subject of solo exhibitions and new scholarship. In 2006 her home (the Dora Maar House) in Ménerbes opened as a retreat for writers, scholars, and artists in a program administered by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.