by Dora Maar is famous as Pablo Picasso’s “weeping woman”, the tormented lover who inspired him to depict her repeatedly in tears. Now a London gallery is trying to re-establish her as a pioneering surrealist artist in her own right, with an exhibition showing photographs recently discovered in her estate.
The exhibition, which opens at London’s Amar Gallery on June 16, will include rare surreal photographs and personal photographs from her time with Picasso. These include two extraordinary portraits of him from the 1930s and one which accounts for the creation of his anti-fascist masterpiece, Guernica, in his studio surrounded by pots of paint. The works were bought at auction from the Maar estate two years ago and have never before been shown in a public gallery.
Born in Paris, Maar was a respected experimental photographer whose work was about to appear at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 alongside Salvador Dalí and Man Ray when she was introduced by the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard for Picasso. At a meeting at the Cafe des Deux Magots in Paris, documented by the art critic Jean-Paul Crespelle, the 54-year-old Picasso noticed the 28-year-old Maar at a nearby table, while she was driving pin between his fingers into the wood again and again. . “Sometimes she lost and a drop of blood could be seen between the embroidered roses on her black gloves,” Crespelle wrote.
This “strange play” of the masochistic young woman with the “serious face” and “bright blue eyes” intrigued the artist, a woman already famous for a seven-year extramarital affair with one of his muses, Marie-Thérèse Walter.
Later, after he and Maar had been in business for nine years, Picasso asked Maar to give him the gloves so he could “lock them up in the display he kept for his memories”, Crespelle wrote.
“When Dora met Picasso, she was already a talented artist and her surreal photographs were considered revolutionary,” said Amar Singh, curator of the exhibition. “But Picasso was extremely controlling and psychologically abusive, and Picasso did not encourage her to continue her photography.”
Unlike Picasso, Maar was a left-wing political activist when they met. In 1934, she was one of the few women who signed “Appel à la lutte”, a petition calling on the French people to fight against fascism, and in 1935, she joined the anti-fascist union Contre-Attaque of revolutionary intellectual alongside the surrealist. André Breton. “She influenced Picasso to paint Guernica – he had never attempted a political painting before,” said Singh.
“I do not think so Guernica It would be without Dora Maar. But she is completely obliterated from that story.”
During the Depression, Maar captured blind street peddlers, shop workers and street children in evocative black and white photographs. She taught Picasso some of her photographic techniques and encouraged his political awareness. When Guernica, Picasso’s native town in Spain, was bombed by Fascists and anti-communist nationalists in 1937, Picasso expressed the “grim” of war and its “ocean of pain and death” through monochrome painting.
“Picasso’s art was influenced by Maar’s photographic practice – it had a great influence on his work,” said Antoine Romand, Dora Maar expert. “She disputed it. She pushed him to do something new and be more politically creative.”
In one of the photographs in the exhibition Maar was given exclusive access to Picasso’s studio to photograph the progress of his painting Guernica. She even painted part of the dying horse in the painting, at Picasso’s request: despite her success as a photographer, he thought she should exchange her camera for a paintbrush, declaring that “inside every photographer is a a painter trying to quit”. By 1940, her passport listed her occupation as “photographic painter”.
“Although he tries to discourage her from surrealist photography, she encourages him and pushes his artistic boundaries in a way that will completely reshape art history,” said Singh.
Picasso painted Maar more than 60 times, usually in tears. In 1943, three years before the relationship ended, he met his next mistress, Françoise Gilot. “It traumatized Dora psychologically and she ended up having a nervous breakdown,” Singh said. After being committed to a psychiatric hospital and receiving electric shock therapy, Maar turned to a religious recluse and gave up photography.
“She said ‘after Picasso, there can only be God’. She completely abandoned her photography practice,” said Romand.
She died in 1997 at the age of 89. Her photos of Picasso were found under her bed in an apartment filled with her pictures. “She wakes up every morning looking at his work, and she couldn’t love again,” Singh said. “Their relationship affected her.”
Interest in Maar’s work has grown over the past decade and her surreal photographs can now be found in the permanent collections of modern art museums around the world, including the Tate, which held a retrospective of her work in 2019. Her surreal photographs are now rare. sold for $200,000 (£158,000), but some are still priced around $6,000.
Singh, like many female artistes of the past, feels that Maar is still in limbo. “One of the unfortunate archetypes in art history is: there will be a singular show – then the wider machine recalibrates to promote the men.”
