There was a time when Dora Maar’s legacy was at risk of being eclipsed by her affiliation with Pablo Picasso. But as perceptions shift, Maar (1907 – 1997) is slowly however certainly regaining her rightful place within the highlight.
The French photographer, painter and poet was a prolific artist in her personal proper, transferring from a profession as a business and trend photographer to a key determine within the surrealist motion. Her affect has now been acknowledged by the Loewe Foundation, which is exhibiting her work at Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid. The exhibition, ‘Dora Maar: Photography and Drawings‘ unites her road images in Spain with a beforehand unseen archive of works on paper.
Etrange Fontaine, 1933, Victoria Combalía
(Image credit score: VEGAP, Madrid 2025)
Dora Maar Woman in purple, 1939, Galerie Boquet and Ambroise Audoin-Rouzeau
(Image credit score: VEGAP, Madrid 2025)
Maar’s drawings are deceptively easy; created in pencil and India ink, they seem at first look to be impressionistic interpretations of domesticity, however quickly spin off into extra summary mish-mashes of cubist varieties, an early indicator of her surrealist future.
Before assembly Picasso in 1935, and turning into his muse, Maar was already established as an avant-garde artist. In the portraits and images on show, we see the Picasso by way of Maar’s eyes. In one set of pictures, she paperwork how Picasso’s Guernica (1937), the artist’s emotional response to the bombing of the Basque city, slowly develops over 35 days.
Dora Maar Pablo Picasso with pals on the seaside, 1940 Throckmorton Fine Art
(Image credit score: VEGAP, Madrid 2025)
Elsewhere within the exhibition, we comply with Maar to Barcelona, the place she travelled in 1935 to seize the extreme local weather within the run-up to the Spanish Civil War. Her photographs of conventional road life – fisherman and basket weavers litter her pictures – are a jarring foil to the deprived communities she photographed, from intercourse staff to impoverished aged individuals. At a time when these individuals fell by way of the cracks of society, Maar’s acknowledgement was a surrealist bid to look beneath the floor.
Throughout, Maar’s dedication to representing the hidden, or uncomfortable is widely known, making this present a well timed, if overdue, retrospective for an important Twentieth-century artist.
‘Dora Maar: Photographs and Drawings’ is on view till 14 September at Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid
Report on the evolution of Guernica, 1937, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
(Image credit score: VEGAP, Madrid 2025)
Blind Beggar, 1937, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
(Image credit score: VEGAP, Madrid 2025)
Self-portrait with minimize breasts, 1939, Galerie Boquet and Ambroise Audoin-Rouzeau
(Image credit score: VEGAP, Madrid 2025)
Portrait of Jean Cocteau, 1949, Throckmorton
(Image credit score: VEGAP, Madrid 2025)