Dora Maar

1907 — 1997

Dora Maar was a French photographer and painter, a romantic partner of Pablo Picasso, and the subject of several of his paintings. Born in Paris in 1907, Maar set up a photographic studio in 1930, working frequently with Pierre Kéfer and taking commercial commissions for clients in advertising and fashion. She shared a darkroom with Brassaï, and incorporated surrealism into her work, making extensive use of mirrors and shadows to shoot photographs that, like her painting, caught the eye in sometimes radical ways.

Maar exhibited solo at the Galerie Vanderberg in Paris, but by the 1940s had devoted much of her energy to painting, tiring of photography. She would return to the art form in the 1980s. As a photographer, Maar shot with a Rolleiflex and was taken by images that were not necessarily beautifully but demanded attention: the homeless, the blind, and the general capacity for street photography to give a voice to people from all walks of life.

Maar was eighty-nine when she died in Paris. Posthumously, a number of experiments with photograms were discovered in her apartment. Outside of her native France, Maar has recently been exhibited at the Tate Modern in London. For her talent at the intersection of painted art and photography, and her influence on the works of Picasso, she remains a key cultural figure of French twentieth-century history.