A Look Back at the Artist Dora Maar

In the early 1930s, Dora Maar (1907-1997) was a leading Surrealist photographer whose daring darkroom experiments hung in Paris galleries alongside the work of Man Ray and Salvador Dali. “She was exploring psychology and dreams and inner states,” says Erin O’Toole, a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where Maar’s Double Portrait (c. 1930s) is appearing in a new group show. Maar’s soaring career faltered after she met Pablo Picasso in 1935. She modeled for him—she was the famed “Weeping Woman”—and became best known as his lover and muse. Picasso, no fan of photography, persuaded her to close her studio, and after their relationship ended, Maar could not regain her former fame. “All his portraits of me are lies,” she would later say. “They’re all Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar.” Those Cubist canvases are no longer the final word on Maar now that her own creations—mysterious, groundbreaking—are again hanging alongside the greats.

Amy Crawford | | READ MORE

Amy Crawford is a Michigan-based freelance journalist writing about cities, science, the environment, art and education. A longtime Smithsonian contributor, her work also appears in CityLab and the Boston Globe.