Diane Drouin, Sorbonne Université
Centre Pompidou, Paris – June 5 2019 – July 29 2019
Tate Modern, London – November 20 2019 – March 15 2020
Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles – April 21 2020 – July 26 2020
The beautiful exhibition that opened at the Centre Pompidou on June 5 is the first major retrospective of Dora Maar’s work, and includes more than 400 works of art. Curated by Damatrice Amao and Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska, it documents Maar’s creative process, from her early years as a fashion photographer to her social photography, from her surrealist experimentations to her life-changing encounter with Picasso, through to her paintings, still lifes and landscapes dating from the 1940s and 1950s.
There had been a ground-breaking exhibition on Maar and Picasso at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2006, but its main focus was the relationship and mutual inspiration of the two artists. Going beyond the myth of Dora Maar as Picasso’s muse, the current exhibition at the Centre Pompidou maps the artistic journey of Dora Maar (1907-1997), born Henriette Théodora Markovitch in Paris.[1] Maar spent her youth in Buenos Aires, before moving to Paris in 1926 and graduating from the Technical School of Photography and Cinematography of the City of Paris.
The first section of the exhibition focuses on Maar’s fashion and commercial photography of the early 1930s. In 1932, she collaborated with the film set designer Pierre Kéfer to open the Kéfer-Dora Maar photography studio in Neuilly-sur-Seine. She worked for fashion magazines and took portraits designed for advertisements in the illustrated press. In her fashion photography, Maar used the technique of photomontage: she superposed different photographs to create striking surrealist effects. For Les années vous guettent/The Years are Waiting for You (1932)–an advertisement for an anti-wrinkle cream–Maar edited a portrait of her close friend Nusch Eluard, and superposed an invading spiderweb to her delicate face. She also photographed nude silhouettes, and in particular the model Assia, represented on the background of a gigantic shadow.
The second part of the exhibition is dedicated to Maar’s political engagements. Like many surrealist artists and thinkers of the 1930s, Dora Maar converted to left-wing politics and signed the ‘Appel à la lutte’ manifesto after the far-right riots in Paris in February 1934. Shortly afterwards, she became involved in the Contre-Attaque group, led by George Bataille. In the early 1930s, Maar ventured beyond studio aesthetics and travelled to Barcelona and London, portraying outcasts and children playing in the streets. Her social photography of the time depicts urban views of windows and street scenes, conveying the harsh reality of poor neighbourhoods. She exhibited her social photographs in the ‘Documents de la vie sociale’ exhibition organised by the Association of Revolutionary Artists and Writers in 1935.
The exhibition highlights Maar’s extraordinary productivity during the interwar years, and the role she played in the surrealist movement. In 1935, Maar opened her own studio at 29 rue d’Astorg, an address which provided the title of a photograph in which a decapitated female figure sits on a bench in front of the distorted arcades of the Orangerie. The Surrealists recognised Maar as a talented photographer and as one of their own. Echoing Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (1924) or Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris[3] (1926), Dora Maar’s surrealist photography emphasises the role of dreams and of the unconscious through collages and photomontages.[2] In Danger (1936), for example, two men seem to be levitating on a beach, one in a state of trance, and the other raising his hands in awe. While examining the large surrealist section of the exhibition, my eyes were also drawn to the ‘Cadavre-exquis’ on display–folded pieces of paper on which different artists (among whom Breton, Jacqueline Lamba and Yves Tanguy) drew unrelated images, in order to create unexpected associations of thoughts.
Dora Maar’s encounter with the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso in the winter of 1935-1936 marked a turning point in her life and career. She was the first to take Picasso’s photograph, and their passionate relationship led to a fascinating collaboration. Maar became Picasso’s muse and model for countless portraits, among which his ‘Femme qui pleure / The Weeping Woman’ (1937). In 1937, Maar also documented Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ and suggested replacing the sun with a light bulb–her photographs of the work in progress were published in Cahiers d’Art.
Throughout her life, Maar also photographed the most prominent artists of her time: Leonor Fini, Paul Eluard and Nusch, Jacqueline Lamba who was to become André Breton’s wife, René Crevel, the Prévert brothers, Yves Tanguy, Jean Cocteau, Marie-Laure de Noailles, among many others. These luminous portraits give a wonderful rendition of the Parisian artistic scene of the 1930s. In addition to the numerous framed photographs on display, projections of Maar’s photographs on the walls enhance the exhibition. In the surrealist section, a crowd was gathered around the famous photograph of Maar by Man Ray, taken in 1936. The close-up on Maar’s face and painted nails emits a deeply surrealist aura.
The last part of the exhibition focuses on a lesser known aspect of Maar’s work, showcasing her still lifes and landscapes that she started painting during the Occupation. Most of them have been clearly influenced by cubism. Maar died in Paris in 1997. For further reading, I would recommend Zoé Valdés’s novel The Weeping Woman (2013)–part biography and part fiction–relating the few days Dora Maar spent in Venice in 1958.[3] Valdés presents a series of vignettes and a striking portrait of Maar, still haunted by the memories of her turbulent relationship with Picasso.
If you have not been able to nip to Paris this summer, the Dora Maar exhibition will later tour the Tate Modern in London and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Sources
[1] Thank you to Naomi Stewart (University of Edinburgh/Edinburgh College of Art) for introducing me to Dora Maar’s photography at the International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS) inaugural conference at Bucknell University in November 2018.
[2] André Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1985); Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).
[3] Zoé Valdés, The Weeping Woman (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2016).
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