'Dora Maar's mother was French and her father was a Croatian-born architect who designed the Austro-Hungarian pavilion at the 1900 Paris World Exhibition. She was born Henriette Theodora Markovitch in 1907 in Paris, and went to Argentina when her father worked there. As a child she preferred Dora to Henriette and later shortened Markovitch to Maar. She started frequenting the Parisian art scene in the late 1920s, at a time when other talented young women were also establishing themselves as professional photographers in what had been a predominantly male world. After attending André Lhote's art academy, where she was a fellow student of Henri Cartier-Bresson (photographs by the two classmates would appear in André Breton's L'Amour fou in 1937), Maar entered the École de Photographie de la Ville de Paris, where she received a technical diploma, of which she was very proud even late in her life. Another acquaintance from the early days was the Hungarian photographer Brassaï, with whom she occasionally shared a darkroom in Montparnasse. Like Lee Miller before her, she asked Man Ray if she might work as his assistant, but, unlike Miller, who moved in with Man Ray, she was turned down. Nonetheless, Man Ray and Maar became good friends: she modeled for one of his celebrated solarized portraits, and his "rayograph" technique, exposing real objects directly onto photographic paper in the darkroom, influenced the work that she and Picasso would later do together.
'In 1931 Maar set up as a professional, working first with the young designer Pierre Kéfer, whose parents financed a photographic studio for him in the garden of their house in Neuilly. Kéfer, according to the journalist Jacques Guenne writing in L'Art Vivant in October 1934, "had the intelligence to realize there was no one better than Dora Markovitch to use the lights, screens and marvelous gadgets with which he has enriched his palace." Working together on commercial commissions, including advertisements for Pétrole Hahn hair oil, she and Kéfer drew on Surrealist techniques such as photomontage in ways typical of the period. In one image wavy hair rather than oil pours out from the neck of a Pétrole Hahn bottle turned on its side. Some of Maar's fashion photographs also incorporate surrealistic elements—in one image a huge, glittery star replaces the head of a model wearing a lamé evening gown. In his article on Maar and Kéfer, Guenne observed Maar's deliberate, almost scientific approach, especially the way she worked with great concentration on her photographs of the celebrated blond model Assia, who came from the Ukraine. In one image, Assia, who was known for her beautifully proportioned body, appears naked but masked and is posed clasping a large ring hanging above her—emphasizing her naked breasts, as if she were performing some kind of erotic routine. Maar's photographs of nudes, many of them tinged with subtle eroticism, were published with the credit "Kéfer– Dora Maar" in magazines such as Secrets de Paris, Le Figaro Illustré, and Beautés.
'... In the spring of 1934 she traveled alone to Spain and England, where she photographed the Catalan fishing village of Tossa de Mar and street life in both Barcelona and London. Combalía believes that the Spanish and English photographs establish Maar's reputation as a serious photographer of modern life, especially in her images of street urchins, beggars, and blind men. To my mind, however, the photographs suggest that Maar was concerned primarily with the artistic qualities of her images rather than with social commentary. When Maar worked out of doors she took time to consider the different elements of a specific composition and was not so much concerned with capturing a fleeting or telling moment as with creating a strong, cohesive image. What fascinated her when she photographed children at play, for instance, were the patterns created by their feet or, when she took scenes of Tossa, the way figures disappeared into shadow alongside fishing boats beached on the sand.
'Picasso once remarked that Maar's photographs reminded him of early paintings by de Chirico, often showing objects "rather difficult to identify in the shadowy corridor between the lens and the light." Another strong element in her photographic compositions is her use of the printed word. Fragments of posters or signs frequently figure in the overall composition as they might in a cubist collage—principally as another formal element—although in some cases, such as the close-up of the English Pearly King on parade on Empire Day (May 21, 1934), the posters and shop-fronts also provide information about place and date.
'After her return to Paris in the summer of 1934, Maar set up her own studio at 29 rue d'Astorg on the right bank, with the financial backing of her parents, and it was there that she lived independently until 1942. Most of the people she knew at the time were associated with the Surrealists and politically left-wing groups, many of whom she photographed, including the philosopher and critic Georges Bataille and his wife the actress Sylvia Maklès, the poet Paul Eluard and his wife Maria Benz (known as Nusch), the painter Jacqueline Lamba and André Breton (whom Lamba would marry), the writers Jacques Prévert and René Crevel, and the actor Jean-Louis Barrault.
'Maar's reputation as a Surrealist in her own right was fixed with the exhibition of her now famous Portrait of Ubu at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936. Although a photograph of an armadillo fetus, Maar's Ubu appears like something derived from Bataille's concept of the informe, a substance or form without fixed or recognizable boundaries, whose unexplained existence seems to emerge from the unconscious rather than from the natural world. Her photographic montage 29 rue d'Astorg (see illustration on page 28), which shows an amorphous Henry Moore–like figure seated in a strangely distorted church interior, was included in the 1937 Surrealist Objects and Poems exhibition in London and was selected by the writer (and future historian of Dada) Georges Hugnet for one of twenty-one Surrealist postcards that were issued in the same year. Breton also included Maar as one of the women whose names appeared on the front of his combined store and Surrealist gallery, GRADIVA (D for Dora), on the rue de la Seine in Paris, which opened in 1937.
'Maar herself was also involved (probably platonically) with the film editor Louis Chavance, whom she had known since she was a student, and through her contacts with him and Jacques Prévert, she was hired in 1935 to do the stills for Jean Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, in which Syl-via Maklès had a principal role and Georges Bataille made a brief appearance dressed as a seminarian. According to Prévert, Maar (whom he described as "volcanic") and Chavance had quarreled early in 1936 just before the press showing of the film—the occasion when Eluard introduced her to Picasso.
'Sometime after this first meeting, Maar orchestrated another encounter with Picasso, this time at the Café des Deux Magots, where she knew he often dined. Years later he told Françoise Gilot that she was wearing black gloves with little pink flowers appliquéed on them. She took off the gloves and picked up a long, pointed knife, which she began to drive into the table between her outstretched fingers to see how close she could come to each finger without actually cutting herself. From time to time she missed by a tiny fraction of an inch and before she stopped playing with the knife, her hand was covered with blood. Pablo told [Françoise Gilot] that was what made up his mind to interest himself in her.... He asked her to give him the gloves and he used to keep them in a vitrine at the Rue des Grands Augustins, along with other mementos.
'Maar suffered a mental collapse in the spring of 1945. ... Her friends thought she might go mad, commit suicide. One day she was found sitting naked in the stairway of her apartment building, to the consternation of a wedding party coming down from an upper floor. And then there was an appalling outburst of hysteria in a movie theater, the police were summoned. A terrified Picasso, who abhorred illness, especially in women, reportedly contacted Jacques Lacan, who had her admitted to a psychiatric clinic. Dujoune Ortiz goes into detail about Lacan's machinations in looking after Maar and the horrific shock treatments that were prescribed as part of her therapy. She also makes the perceptive observation that Picasso's paintings of Maar as a weeping woman eerily anticipate the terror she must have suffered in the moments before the shock treatments were administered. Although Maar and Picasso would go on seeing each other for another year, he wanted a final break and, as if to underscore his determination to replace her, he took Gilot to stay in the house in Ménerbes that he had given Maar.
'During the last twenty years of her life, Maar retreated into Catholic mysticism, becoming even more of a recluse than before. Although she later resented what she came to believe was the stupidity of the Surrealists' attitude toward the Church, she returned, in her last years, to experimenting with her own photographic negatives that dated from the 1930s. ... A year or two before she died, Maar told Richardson that she had made a will leaving everything to a Parisian monastery, where she went to worship; but it appears that the priests whom she had designated as her heirs died before she did. At least this was the reason given for her having died intestate. (Maar's apartment was apparently entered during the night following her death, and Dujoune Ortiz raises the possibility that her will may have been stolen.) Two of Maar's distant relatives were traced by a genealogist who was appointed by the French authorities, and her entire collection, including her photographs, paintings, books, and intimate possessions were sold at auction. This event attracted dealers, art historians, biographers, and curiosity seekers. Everything was put on view without the least regard for their meaning and without any attempt to put them in intelligible order. The sudden dispersal of the things that had meant so much to her seemed to those who knew her a cruel violation of her carefully protected inner world. As a result of the sale, future students of art history lost not only a valuable archive but the possibility of recapturing the personal associations that linked her possessions and her memories.' -- Marilyn McCully, from The Surreal Life of Dora Maar, New York Review of Books
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