Dora Maar

(France, 22/11/1907 - 16/07/1997)

Born Henriette Markovitch, Maar was raised in Argentina where her father was working as an architect. From this early introduction to artistic principles, she developed an instinct for observation and visual form that would define her career spanning photography, painting, sculpture and poetry. At the age of 19, she and her family returned to her mother’s home town of Paris where she started taking classes at the Académie Julian and later studied at the École de Photographie, where she mastered both classical draftsmanship and the technical complexities of the photographic medium. This dual foundation made her equally capable of constructing an image with precise craftsmanship and of destabilising it through experimentation.

After shortening her name to Dora Maar in the late 1920s, she emerged as one of the most distinctive photographers of her generation. Her commercial work in fashion and advertising demonstrated a sophisticated command of light and an elegant modernist sensibility, yet it was in her Surrealist experiments that her imagination truly flourished. She crafted photomontages and manipulations that merged dream and reality, often imbuing the everyday with an unsettling psychological charge. Figures dissolved into shadows, objects acquired symbolic weight and meticulously staged compositions unsettled the viewer’s sense of certainty. These works situated her among key avant-garde thinkers of interwar Paris, where she moved in circles that championed intellectual freedom, political reflection and radical redefinitions of art.

Maar’s street photography, captured in France, Spain, England and beyond, reveals a compassionate yet critical eye. She photographed children, laborers, beggars and urban passersby with a sensitivity attuned to economic hardship and social disparity. Her images of London’s Depression-era streets and the working-class suburbs of Paris combine documentary clarity with emotional depth, testifying to her acute awareness of the world’s tensions and her belief that art could illuminate social truths without sacrificing beauty or complexity.

An accomplished artist long before she met Pablo Picasso, their relationship has often overshadowed her own artistic work, despite representing only a fragment of her oeuvre. During this period, she created the celebrated photographic documentation of Guernica’s development which became an invaluable record of artistic process, but her own practice continued to evolve beyond that association.

After their separation, she turned increasingly to painting, seeking a medium that allowed for introspection and spiritual inquiry. Her canvases from the 1940s onward reveal a shift toward abstraction with muted palettes, architectural forms and luminous surfaces that evoke inner landscapes more than external scenes. This transformation was not a retreat but an expansion, marking her commitment to exploring emotion and metaphysics through painterly means.

In her later life, Maar continued to explore fragmentation, symbolism and a restrained, sometimes ascetic visual language. Nevertheless, the only exhibition of her work as a photographer in her lifetime was held in Valencia, Spain, in 1995, when she was 88 years old, and it was also around this time that she briefly returned to photography, reprising the technique of the photogram. She also made regular additions to her poetry notebook, which she called “a secret that remains a secret even to myself”, until her death.

Today, Maar is recognised as a major figure of twentieth century art, a boundary-crossing creator who redefined the possibilities of photography to contribute meaningfully to Surrealism and forged a deeply introspective path in painting. Her legacy endures as that of an artist of remarkable sensitivity, technical mastery and enduring vision.

Image: Dora Maar, Untitled (Hand-shell) (c.1934). Gelatin silver print, 56.6 x 38 cm. Centre Pompidou, Paris.