Untitled (Hand-Shell)
Dora Maar
DORA MAAR, 1934. GELATIN SILVER PRINT.
In the public imagination, Dora Maar is perhaps most readily known as Picasso’s great lover and the subject of Weeping Woman, amongst his most important and famous works. Yet this understanding is grounded in so much historical misogyny, and the constant erasure and redefinition of female artists as muses for their male counterparts. Maar was seismic and seminal in her own right, one of the most important photographers in the mediums burgeoning days, and a pioneering image maker across the camera and brush. Studying painting and photography at one of Paris’ most progressive art schools in the 1920s, she quickly began creating remarkable works, combining her images into surreal photomontages and staging eerie, uncanny scenes. She was commissioned by fashion brands, advertisers, and galleries to construct her strange worlds that seemed to blend dreams and reality, with a level of subconscious eroticism throughout them all. Alongside this, she worked as a street photographer, documenting the increasing poverty in Europe with a fast action Rollei-Flex, which she would in turn sometimes use in her collages. Maar has, in recent years, reclaimed her place as a pioneering and foundation figure of surrealism, and a leader of early centuries’ photography movement, on par with Man Ray.