Artwork
Biography
Henriette Theodora Markovitch was born in 1907 and raised between Argentina and France. Her Croatian father was an architect, whilst her French mother owned a fashion boutique. Her young ambition to become an artist was encouraged by her family who faciliated her studies in applied arts and painting at the Académie Julian, before later transitioning to the Central Union of Decorative Arts and their School of Photography, both in Paris.
By the 1930s the pseudonym Dora Maar was established, under which she cultivated successes in advertising and fashion photography. Maar opened her first studio with set designer Pierre Kéfer, and soon after, the pair were published in Art et Métiers Graphiques. Publications with Le Figaro and Cahiers d’Art followed, as well as commissions from Le Mont Saint-Michel, Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli.
Although a commercial photographer, Maar was innovative and experimental. She utilised shadow and dramatic angles as well as played with collage and photomontage to blend fantasy and fiction. Themes of escapism and the unconscious were motivated by the socio-political and economic unrest within Europe at the time. In 1933, Maar presented her first solo exhibition at the Galerie Vanderberg, Paris, and was subsequently welcomed into the Surrealist circle. She was included in the London International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, alongside André Breton, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, with whom a passionate yet tumultuous love affair ensued.
The relationship with Picasso had a profound affect on both their careers. In 1937 she documented the creation of Guernica; his political reflection on the Spanish Civil War, and in the same year was subject for his infamous Weeping Woman. In turn, Picasso influenced Maar’s return to painting, which endured as her medium for life.
To contrast the precision in her surrealist photography, Maar’s paintings explored abstraction and gestural mark making. Her compositions focused on the solitude of landscape and still life, particularly after the breakdown of her relationship with Picasso in 1944. Bouts of depression followed, causing her to retreat in isolation to Ménerbes, Southern France. Painting served as recuperation, barren plains with stark moments of fixation and concentration on the pure object were metaphors for the reclamation of her own life – to be present in the here and the now. Many of her works on paper remained as private contemplation, their discovery occuring only after her death in 1997.
For decades Maar was best known as Picasso’s muse, obscuring her own talents and impact. However, the recent concentration on overlooked women artists has recentred Maar in the zeitgeist. In 2019 the Tate Modern; London and Centre Pompidou; Paris hosted a collaborative retrospective of over 200 works across all media, to celebrate her six-decade career. Works by Maar are held in institutional collections including Museum of Modern Art; New York, Getty Museum; Los Angeles and National Museum Centro de Arte Reina Sofia; Madrid.
Image credit:
Dora Maar dans son atelier rue de Savoie, 1943 by Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
Musèe National Picasso-Paris and Estate Brassaï/RMN-Grand Palais©
Media
Read: Dora Maar at Tate Modern (2019)
The first UK retrospective of her work, showing over 200 images across all media.
