NEW YORK, NY.- Dora Maar: Paris in the Time of Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and Picasso is at once an important look at Surrealist photography and a richly illustrated biography of the beautiful, talented, and mysterious photographer Dora Maar, publishing to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of her death. In the skilled hands of art writer Louise Baring, the book heroically restores Maar’s photographs to their place in history, featuring never-before-published images, many from the Pompidou Museum in Paris, that showcase the magnitude of her photographic talent.
Baring ushers readers through Maar’s unconventional childhood in Paris and Buenos Aires, where she was raised by a hot-tempered Croatian father and a fervent French Catholic mother. Born Henrietta Markovitch (the name Theodora was added on years later), she found herself drawn to the arts and attended art school with Henri Cartier-Bresson. By the early 1930s, she was working as a professional photographer, creating an impressive body of both commercial and artistic work. She also shared a studio with Brassaï and was friendly with Man Ray. Through some key introductions, Maar soon found herself surrounded by key figures in the Surreralist movement like the poet Paul Éluard, Georges Bataille (who became her lover), and André Breton. Within this circle her photographs began to garner attention among those interested in Surrealism.
When Maar met Picasso in 1935, she became the most influential of his many muses, inspiring much of what is considered to be his best work, including the legendary Weeping Woman series, but during the ten years that she was his mistress, she abandoned her career. There were a few exceptions such as the famous series documenting Picasso painting Guernica and a photograph that graced the cover of Time magazine. Some of Maar’s contemporaries say that Picasso discouraged her work because he could not tolerate the possibility that she could be better than him and Maar ultimately surrendered to Picasso’s all-powerful creative genius and put her camera down for good. Maar’s love affair with the great Spanish modernist spanned the tumultuous years between the Spanish Civil War and the end of the Second World War, when Picasso famously abandoned her for the cool-headed, far-younger Françoise Gilot in 1945.
With Picasso no longer in her life, she retreated to her second-floor apartment near the Seine for over fifty years until her death in July 1997, four months before her ninetieth birthday. Maar lived much like Miss Havisham in Dickens’ Great Expectations, clinging to the past and creating a “private museum” crammed with books, Picasso’s drawings, letters, playful paper cutouts, miniature sculptures, tiny framed portraits, and jewelry that the artist designed for her. Alongside this shrine to her former lover was her own art work, a collection of her photographs long abandoned and forgotten for decades. In October 1998, art collectors gathered in Paris for the first of six auctions of Maar’s treasured secret hoard which opened to the door for her story to be told.
How did this prominent member of the Surrealist movement and an artist in her own right fade into obscurity? Louise Baring’s beautifully written book shines the spotlight on this enigmatic figure giving her a well-deserved spot among the artists and intellectuals of the day: Jean Cocteau, glamorous Nusch Éluard (Paul Éluard’s wife whose early death in 1946 contributed to Maar’s breakdown), Lee Miller, and arts patron and hostess Marie-Laure de Noailles. DORA MAAR lifts the veil from Dora Maar and her extraordinary body of work to show that Maar needs to be recognized for the fine photographer that she was and not only remembered as a figure lurking in the shadow of Pablo Picasso.
Louise Baring has written on the arts for the Economist, Vogue, The Daily Telegraph, and the Independent on Sunday. She is the author of Norman Parkinson, Martine Franck, and Emmy Andriesse: Hidden Lens. Baring lives and works in London.
