Dora Maar

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Dora Maar was a pioneer Surrealist photographer, painter and poet of French-Croatian origins. Between 1923 and 1926, she trained in the decorative arts at a progressive school for young girls. She first gained recognition for her work in advertising and fashion illustration. Artistically, she is particularly celebrated for her technique of photomontage, constructing oneiric and uncanny choreographies, which lead to powerful associations between different aspects of modern life and its social stratifications. The monumental, the ironic and the monstrous all cohabitate the surfaces of the works. Her social engagement is also evoked in her work with documentary photography, chronicling the lives of working class and marginalised subjects in metropoles such as London or Paris. In 2019, two majour retrospectives of Dora Maar’s works took place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at Tate Modern, London. These marked an important step in uncovering the vastness of Dora Maar’s oeuvre to the public eye, which until recently was foreshadowed by her famed romantic partnership with Pablo Picasso. Her works are part of other paramount public collections of modern art such as that of MOMA, New York, the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid or the Getty Museum, Los Angeles.