'Abstract in Turquoise and Gray' by Dora Maar, 1930s French Woman Artist, Picasso, Guernica

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Signed, verso, with artist monogram 'DM' for Dora Maar (French, additionally impressed, upper left, with Dora Maar estate sale stamp … Read more Signed, verso, with artist monogram 'DM' for Dora Maar (French, additionally impressed, upper left, with Dora Maar estate sale stamp (Maison de la Chimie, Paris; October, 1998)

Although well known as friend, model and muse of Picasso during the period of his creation of Guernica, (in which she is, herself, portrayed as the lantern bearer), it is often overlooked that Dora Maar was already a successful artist and much published photographer before their paths crossed. Long before her two year liaison with Picasso, she had produced a respected body of work and was considered an influential and cutting edge artist. Nevertheless, the relationship with Picasso, the character and disposition of the person, Dora Maar and her personality as a woman, both in publications about Picasso and in the few that are dedicated to her, have come to assume a formidable significance in art-historical literature. Naturally, the person and the artist Dora Maar are inextricably interwoven. Her close link to the Surrealists, for example, can be ascribed as much to her widely observed, enigmatic and unapproachable radiance as to the artistic and political statements that had characterized her photographs and photomontages from the early 1930s.

Born in 1907, Henrietta Theodora Markovitch adopted the pen name of Dora Maar during the first years of her photography career. Dora grew up in Buenos Aires and Paris, learnt to speak French, Spanish and English fluently and, from 1927 on, attended the art academy of Andre Lhote in Montparnasse. Here she was still a student of painting, but at the end of the 1920s, she changed to the Ecole de Photographie de la Ville de Paris and, in the early 1930s, founded a photographic studio together with Pierre Kfer, who was later to make a career as stage designer. Numerous fashion and advertising photographs resulted. These were soon followed by the first Paris exhibitions of her own work.

Dora Maar's photographic style in her productive years of the 1930s show clear, surrealist characteristics. In her photographs and photomontages, she frequently plays with shifting proportions, thus echoing an important feature of surrealist pictures. This tendency is augmented by the unreal combination of disparate objects, which robs the photographs of their character of reflecting extreme reality, converting them to expressions of inner visions and psychic states. In parallel to these surreal photographs, Dora Maar produced sobering documentary photographs of her urban environments in Paris, London or Barcelona. Repeatedly, she records, in her photographs, the underprivileged, the unemployed and homeless, the socially or physically weak. It was precisely the simplicity of the photos that enabled Dora Maar to give the day-to-day and the ugly a magnificent monstrosity in which the beautiful and the horrible blend into one another. The recorded reality is thus accompanied by a level of inner associations, fears and visions.

The present work, which remained in Dora Maar's possession until the end of her life, dates to the late 1930's and shows her preoccupation with the complex inter-relationship of color and form.

This painting is accompanied by a first edition, hard copy of 'Picasso's Weeping Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar' by Mary Ann Caws, Bulfinch Press, 2000.

Reference:
E. Benezit, Dictionnaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs, et Graveurs, Jacques Busse, 1999 Nouvelle Édition, Gründ 1911, Vol. 8, p. 899; et al. See less