Description

This is one of two drawings by Dora Maar, the muse and lover of Pablo Picasso and, more important, artist in her own right.  

Details

• Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
• Untitled nude
• Ink on paper
  
• Signed D.M. and stamped en verso
  
• 17" x 19 1/2" (overall) matted and framed in a gray wooden frame, under glass
• Minor toning to edges of paper

About the Artist

We would like to set the record straight right here and now:  Dora Maar was a strong, fascinating, talented and accomplished woman long before she became, for better or worse, the muse and lover of Pablo Picasso.  Born Henriette Markovitch in 1907, Maar spent her childhood in Paris and Buenos Aires where her father was an architect. Upon the family's return to Paris in 1926 she began her art training in earnest at the Central Union of Decorative Arts, the School of Photography, the École des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Julian.  During those early years she was introduced to Henri Catier-Bresson and befriended surrealist artist Jacqueline Lamba.  Dora Maar would be associated with surrealism, and its associated leftist, anti-fascist politics, for much of her career.  What is especially striking is her early determination to make a name for herself as a commercial photographer, establishing an independent studio and even sharing a darkroom at one time with Brassaï.  By the 1930s she had emerged as a leading photographer and exhibited in Paris galleries alongside Man Ray and Salvador Dali.  

In 1935 Maar was introduced to Pablo Picasso and became his companion and muse for 9 years.  Maar took pictures in Picasso's Grands-Augustins studio.  It is said that Picasso used her photographs of the various stages of his master work, Guernica, to shape the final outcome.  Despite Maar's positive induce on his work, Picasso preferred to see her as a victim and often portrayed her in his works as "the weeping woman", a depiction Dora Maar resented.  After their separation in 1943 Dora Maar received treatment for her depression, renewed her interest in Catholicism and migrated from photography to painting landscapes as well as abstracted figural works.

Maar's work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, most notably at the Centre Pompidou and the Tate Modern in 2019.  Among other institutions, her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty Museum.