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Would Dora Maar have been so web-known and so appreciated if she hadn’t been Picasso’s companion for ten years? If she hadn’t photographed Guernica? In crossing Picasso’s path she became first of all the painter’s new model and then later a tragical victim. The painter’s new model and then later a tragic victim. The painter exalted her but also put paid, in a way, to a career in photography already brilliant under way. Before meeting the artist from Malaga, Dore Maar was an emancipated, intelligent, cultured and politically active woman. She was admired by all the Surrelists and had been the lover of the cineste Louis Chavance and the great philosopher and revolutionary George Bataille.
Her best photographs are impregnated with a poetics related to that of Surrealism. In particular, Dore Maar emplys a De Chirico like architecture to arrive at a dreamlike, enigmatic atmosphere. She experimented with collage, photomontage and superimposition. In her street photos she displays a sort of secular piety towards the crippled people, hawkers, down-and-outs, mothers and children depicted there.
When she met Picasso she started painting again, and, once abandoned by him, withdrew into an introspective and mystical way of life. She lived as a recluse for more than forty years. Today, the moment has come to restore to Dora Maar her rightful place in the history of photography in the 1930s.
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