Dora Maar (Henriette Theodora Markovitch, 1907-1997) of French-Croatian descent, born in Paris and raised in Argentina, was a photographer, painter, and poet with inspiring but also highly charged work. She studied photography and painting and quickly spread her artistic virtues. Since the early 1930s her photographic work has been dominated by Surrealist positions, techniques and temperament coupled with her tendency to be magnetized by the particular and the extreme.

Her photographs of the poor in Paris after the crash of 1929 stand out because they combine faith in human dignity with mysterious surreal models and offer her a unique place in the circle of Parisian artists.

Young, thoughtful, beautiful and enigmatic, politically aware, she spends a creative period in which she produces excellent images by photographing either still life, portraits, fashion, nude or various scenes on the streets of Paris, Barcelona and London, revealing her paradox. life.

In 1936, her acquaintance with Pablo Picasso was to indelibly mark her life. She has been his muse and lover for about a decade during which the painter creates great works (Guernica, The Weeping Woman, Dora Maar seated, Dora Maar with cat, etc.). Maar puts some vertical touches on Guernica’s horse, as a minimal but highly symbolic contribution. What later gives her a wider fame are the photos she makes at the artist’s studio, covering all the stages of creating this masterpiece. In 1945, her innate hypersensitivity, her depressive tendencies, and the despair brought about by Picasso’s separation, threaten her mental health.

Picasso gives her a house in the countryside, and their good friend poet Paul Eluard introduces her to psychiatrist Jacques Lacan who, through psychoanalysis , helps her gradually recover. Later, he directs her to seek refuge in the Roman Catholic Church. She returns to creation focusing her artistic interest on the personal poetry and painting that accompany her to the end of her life without ever forgetting Picasso. Features: After Picasso, God.In a poem she writes: The soul that remains tearful of yesterday is quiet — its exile suspended. A country without art, only nature. The memory, pure magnolia, so distant … I’m blind … and made of a small piece of land. But your glare never leaves me. And your angel holds me.

The “Double portrait with hat, 1936-37” photo is of a cubist nature, encompassing elements of surreal experimentation. It came from a montage of negatives with parallel manual surgery.

Text: Dimitris Tsevas.

From “Dora Maar With And Without Picasso: A Biography, by Mary Ann Caws”