Dora Maar is best known as Pablo Picasso’s “weeping woman,” his grief-stricken lover who inspired him to paint her in tears many times. Now a gallery in London is trying to re-establish him as a pioneering surrealist artist with an exhibition of photographs recently discovered at his mansion.
The exhibition, which will open at the Amar Gallery in London on June 16, will feature rare surrealist photograms and intimate photographs from her time with Picasso. These include two extraordinary portraits of him from the 1930s and a portrait depicting the creation of his anti-fascist masterpiece. Guernica, in his studio surrounded by pots of paint. The works were purchased at auction from Maar’s estate two years ago and have never been exhibited in a public gallery before.
Paris-born Maar was a respected experimental photographer who was about to exhibit alongside Salvador Dalí and Man Ray at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition, where French surrealist poet Paul Éluard introduced him to Picasso. In one encounter at the Cafe des Deux Magots in Paris, documented by art critic Jean-Paul Crespelle, Picasso, 54, noticed Maar, 28, sitting at a nearby table, repeatedly stabbing the pocket knife into the wood between his fingers. . “Sometimes he would miss, and a drop of blood would appear among the roses embroidered on his black gloves,” Crespelle wrote.
This “strange game” of the masochistic young woman with a “serious face” and “pale blue eyes” attracted the attention of the artist, a notorious womanizer who was already in a seven-year extramarital affair with one of his muses, Marie-Thérèse Walter.
Later, after he and Maar began their nine-year relationship, Crespelle wrote that Picasso would ask Maar to give him the gloves so he could “lock them in the display case where he kept them as a souvenir.”
“Dora was already a talented artist when she met Picasso, and her surrealist photographs were considered revolutionary,” said Amar Singh, curator of the exhibition. “But Picasso was extremely controlling and psychologically abusive, and she was discouraged from pursuing photography by Picasso.”
Unlike Picasso, Maar was a left-wing political activist when they met. In 1934, she was one of the few women who signed the “Appel à la lutte” pamphlet calling on the French people to fight against fascism, and in 1935 she joined the anti-fascist Contre-Attaque union of revolutionary intellectuals together with the surrealists. André Breton. “He influenced Picasso to paint Guernica – had never entered the political picture before,” Singh said.
“I don’t think so Guernica Dora Maar would exist without it. But he is completely removed from this narrative.”
During the Depression, Maar captured blind street vendors, shopkeepers, and street children in evocative black and white photographs. She taught Picasso some photographic techniques and encouraged his political awareness. When Picasso’s hometown of Guernica, a town in Spain, was bombed by fascists and anti-communist nationalists in 1937, Picasso expressed his “hatred” for the war and its “ocean of pain and death” by painting monochrome.
“Maar’s photography practice influenced Picasso’s art; he had a great influence on his work,” said Dora Maar expert Antoine Romand. “He challenged it. It pushed him to do something new and be more creative politically.”
One of the photographs in the exhibition shows Maar being given special access to Picasso’s studio to photograph the progress of his painting. Guernica. He even painted part of the dying horse in the painting at Picasso’s request: despite his success as a photographer, he thought Picasso should replace his camera with a paintbrush, declaring that “inside every photographer there is a painter trying to get out.” By 1940 his profession was listed as “photographer-painter” in his passport.
“While he discourages him from pursuing surrealist photography, she encourages him and pushes his artistic boundaries in a way that completely reshapes art history,” Singh said.
Picasso painted Maar more than 60 times, often in tears. In 1943, three years before ending the relationship, he met his next mistress, Françoise Gilot. “He psychologically traumatized Dora and she eventually had a nervous breakdown,” said Singh. After being admitted to a psychiatric hospital and receiving electric shock treatment, Maar became a religious recluse and abandoned photography.
“’After Picasso, there can only be God,’ he said. “He left the photography profession altogether,” Romand said.
He died in 1997 at the age of 89. Photographs of Picasso were found under his bed in an apartment filled with his paintings. “He woke up every morning minding his work and could never fall in love again,” Singh said. “His relationships destroyed him.”
Interest in Maar’s work has been reignited in the last decade, and his surrealist photographs can now be found in the permanent collections of modern art museums around the world, including the Tate, which held a retrospective of his work in 2019. They sell for $200,000 (£158,000), although some still cost around $6,000.
Singh feels that Maar, like many female artists of the past, is still overlooked. “It’s one of those unfortunate examples in art history: there will be a singular spectacle, and then the larger machine will be recalibrated to defend men.”