Dora Maar French, 1907-1997

Dora Maar (1907–1997) made some of the defining photographs of Surrealism, yet for much of the century that followed she was known primarily in relation to Pablo Picasso. Portrait d’Ubu (1936), described by her biographer as an icon of Surrealism, belongs to the same radical body of work as Le Simulateur and 29, rue d’Astorg. Through photomontage, rephotography and darkroom manipulation, Maar transformed fragments of reality into unsettling inventions, using the authority of the photographic image to make the strange appear real. Her photographs of the city similarly displaced the familiar, tilting ordinary experience into the uncanny.

Born Henriette Théodora Markovitch in Tours in 1907 to a French mother and Croatian father, Maar spent her childhood in Argentina before returning to Paris in the late 1920s to study photography. By the early 1930s, she was running a commercial studio with the set designer Pierre Kéfer, producing fashion and advertising photographs while pursuing an increasingly experimental practice of her own. She travelled to Barcelona and London to photograph poverty and social conditions, while the expanding illustrated press provided a platform for her staged photographs, collage and photomontage. Across these forms, she brought an unmistakably Surrealist sensibility to the possibilities of photography.

Maar exhibited with the Surrealists from 1935, including the landmark group exhibition at the Galerie Charles Ratton in 1936. Through this circle she met Pablo Picasso in late 1935 or early 1936. She photographed him in her studio at 29 rue d’Astorg and introduced him to her darkroom experiments with painted glass-plate negatives. Picasso painted directly onto the plates, a technique Maar later said had originated with him after she showed him the process.

In 1937, Maar photographed Picasso working on Guernica in his studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins, recording the painting through eight successive states as it developed. These photographs constitute the only sustained visual record of the work’s making; Maar herself added several grey strokes to the horse. Her Surrealist practice has also been understood as shaping the painting rather than merely documenting it. Her relationship with Picasso lasted until 1945.

After the relationship ended, Maar largely abandoned photography for painting. She left Paris for Provence, where she produced abstract landscapes and still lifes, eventually withdrawing from public life and becoming increasingly devout. She never returned to the camera. Maar died in Paris in 1997, aged eighty-nine. In 2019, the Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern and the J. Paul Getty Museum mounted the first major retrospective to establish the full breadth of her work beyond her association with Picasso