La Grand Range

Born Henriette Theodora Markovitch, she was the daughter of a Croatian architect and French mother. She was a photographer, painter and poet and was also a lover and muse of Pablo Picasso. Maar was born in Paris but the family moved to Buenos Aires in 1910 where her father had several commissions, including the embassy of Austria-Hungary. The family returned to Paris in 1926 when she adopted the pseudonym of Dora Maar and took courses at the Central Union of Decorative Arts and School of Photography. She also enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Julian. At this time she began to frequent the workshop of Andre Lhote where she met the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. She set up her own photograph studio with Pierre Kefer where they worked mostly on commercial and fashion commissions. When the workshop ceased its activities she left Paris for Barcelona and then London, returning to Paris to open another workshop were most of her work was influenced by socialist politics of the time, often showing the effects of the depression on the poor. She was also involved in many Surrealist groups and often participated in demonstrations and leftist café groups. In 1935 she was introduced to Pablo Picasso and became his companion and his muse. Their relationship was to last for nearly nine years during which time she was his principal model. She took pictures in his studio at the Grands Augustins and tracked the later stages of his work on Guernica. Her relationship with Picasso was turbulent and ended in 1943. After a breakdown and struggling with depression she retired to a house Picasso bought for in Menebes, Vaucluse where she abandoned photography and started to paint, expressing herself in paintings of the landscapes around her house in the Luberon region. The English art critic John Russell, who befriended Maar in the 1950s, described her as a woman of great distinction and resolutely private: “[Her paintings] represent, beyond question a solitary’s view of the world,” he wrote in the foreword to Maar’s 1958 show at the Leicester Galleries in London. Maar did not go to the opening.