• Navigation
  • Home
  • Search Photos
  • Photographers
  • Special Sale
  • Photo Exhibits
  • Member Dealers
  • Collecting
  • Newsletter
  • Calendar
  • Photo Links

• Home
• Issue #268
• Article

By Michael Diemar

Installation photo by Michael Diemar.

Amar Gallery, based in London’s Fitzrovia district (12–14 Whitfield Street), has an interesting mission, aiming to show world- post-war and contemporary art, and to champion historically overlooked and important female, LGBT+ and minority artists. The gallery first opened its doors in Islington, North London in 2017, and after a two-year stint, went nomadic, before reopening in June this year with a Dora Maar exhibition.

The gallery was founded by Amar Singh, art dealer and activist, who started dealing in 2010. He has also made numerous donations over the years, and had according the gallery’s website, by February this year, donated 23 artworks to nine institutions, worth in excess of $3 million. Part of the proceeds from "Dora Maar: Behind the Lens" will go towards supporting Shakti Vahini & We Power, two notable anti-trafficking organisations in India which provide for the protection of women and children in India.

The exhibition is a celebration of Maar’s life and is in conjunction with the upcoming release of bestselling author Louisa Treger’s book, "The Paris Muse", (a fictional account) based on Maar's affair with Picasso, and the theatrical production "Maar, Dora" which is performing at Camden Fringe in August and is produced by Amar Gallery, Nadia Jackson & Spiky Saul.

Dora Maar (1907 - 1997), Self Portrait, c.1935 (printed later by the estate), 26 cm x 26 cm (10.23 in. x 10.23 in.), Gelatin silver print (edition of 5). Courtesy of the Dora Maar Estate.

In a press release Louisa Treger states "Dora Maar is mostly known for being Picasso's Weeping Woman, as though tears are the only interesting thing about her. Amar Gallery and my novel put her at the heart of the story and give her the recognition she deserves." An assertion I find more than a little problematic.

It may have been the case that Dora Maar was once mostly known for being Picasso’s Weeping Woman, to the world at large that is. For afficionados of art and photography, she was known as the creator of those striking Surrealist images. The great turnaround in her reputation began after her death in 1997, followed by a series of auctions in Paris in 1998 and one in 1999, organised by the Paris auction house Piasa & Mathias. It was extraordinary material, paintings, drawings, books and photographs. As for the latter, a good chunk of the best of it went into the French institutions.

Much of said material would be included the big Dora Maar retrospective which opened in 2019 at Centre Pompidou before travelling to Tate Modern. The final stop, at the Getty Museum, was cancelled due to the pandemic. I reviewed the exhibition for this newsletter, Issue #252, published 7/1/2019, and I noted that having hesitated between painting and photography, Emmanuel Sougez advised her to pursue the latter. And I then trawled through her career as a photographer: the early snapshots, the fashion and advertising work produced having set up a studio with Pierre Kéfer in 1930, her documentary work focusing on the poor in Paris, London and Barcelona, and then her famous Surrealist montages.

In late 1935 or early 1936 she started a relationship with Picasso. Following the bombing of Guernica on April 26, 1937, Picasso set to work on his masterpiece, with Dora Maar documenting every stage of its development, herself even adding some brushstrokes, as she would later inform Picasso's biographer, John Richardson.

Dora Maar, Abstract Compositions, c.1980, 23.7 cm x 17.7 cm (9.33 in. x 6.96 in.), unique photogram, Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Dora Maar Estate.

Shortly thereafter, Dora Maar sold her photographic equipment, at the advice of Picasso, to pursue painting instead. It was a devilish move on his part, most likely sprung out of jealousy. In photography, she had a life away from him. In painting, she would never be more than a student.

Following the break with Picasso, Dora Maar suffered a number of psychotic episodes, spent months at a psychiatric hospital where she was subjected to electric shock treatment. After her release, she went through analysis with Jacques Lacan, who detected a religious streak in her, seeing it as her only way through darkness. As he would later state, "It was God or a straitjacket."

She would continue to paint, and around 1980, take up photography again, creating photograms, sometimes repurposing her old negatives. The curators of the retrospective tried to make the case that she was a major talent as a painter but it just wasn’t convincing.

As for Dora Maar being overlooked, in addition to the retrospective, there has been a stream of some 20 books in the last two decades, including Brigitte Benkemoun’s "Finding Dora Maar" (2020), "Dora Maar, secrets d'atelier" (2023), based on the discovery of a cache of material dating from 1936 to 1943, shown at La Maison Dora Maar, the house in Ménerbes that Picasso gave to her as a parting gift, purchased after her death by American arts patron Nancy Brown Negley, who has since renovated and opened it as a cultural center.

In the word overlooked there’s something else at play, I think: a wish to see Dora Maar given status as one the 20th-century’s leading artists. The problem is that the quality of the work is just so madly uneven.

Surrealism was, when it started out, primarily a literary movement, rooted in psychology and philosophy, although it would soon mainly be associated with the visual arts. In retrospect, it attracted more than a few not very talented practitioners, producing work that these days comes across as modish, contrived and labored.

Dora Maar, Virgin and Crucifix, c.1980, 26 cm x 26 cm (10.23 in. x 10.23 in.), Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Dora Maar Estate.

In comparison, Dora Maar's "Ubu Roi", the foetus of an armadillo, named after the 1896 Alfred Jarry play, and her photomontages, including 29 rue d’Astorg, Le Simulateur, Le Pisseur, Silence, Jeux Interdits and others, are to my mind the finest works of Surrealism, in any medium. Despite the photomontages having been created with complex processes, they seem completely spontaneous, sprung straight from the subconscious.

The problem for anyone in the commercial sector wanting to stage an exhibition of Dora Maar’s work is that those works simply aren’t available. The images exist as one, two or three prints--most of them in institutions.

Still, from time to time, material emerges. On June 28 2022, Parisian auction house Ader held an auction of Dora Maar material, vintage prints and negatives, mostly of the documentary and snapshot variety. In October that same year, Huxley-Parlour Gallery, London, staged an exhibition with some of that material. And that exhibition had something in common with the current show at Amar Gallery, in that I feel that both rely on the legend of Dora Maar.

The exhibition at Amar Gallery features some two dozen works. In addition to photograms, created around 1980, there are a few vintage prints, portraits of Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Jacqueline Lamba and Jean-Louis Barrault (the latter misidentified here as Jean Marais), as well posthumous prints. The photograms have been well chosen, better than many others I have seen by her, although I don’t think she can be said to have brought the technique forward. The portraits are good, but can in no way compete with the ones she took of Nuesch Éluard, Leonor Fini or Assia, the latter a favorite model of the Surrealists.

Installation photo by Michael Diemar.

There are two huge enlargements: one of her famous 1935 fashion image, with a star resting on the shoulder of a model, and the other, her appropriation of a Man Ray image with Picasso's eyes scratched out. Interspersed with the images, are framed quotes, by and about Dora Maar, "I am as good as Man Ray" (as she once told gallerist Marcel Fleiss), and poignantly, to Picasso, "You’ve never loved anyone in your life. You don’t know what love is."

Which takes me to "the weeping woman." John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer and one of very few that Dora Maar trusted and agreed to see in her apartment in rue de Savoie towards the end of her life, once said, "You will understand nothing of Dora Maar, if you forget that she was above all a masochist."

Picasso would, according to Richardson, tell Françoise Gilot (who replaced Dora Maar and would be the only one of "Picasso’s women" who had the gall to leave him), that he had never loved Dora Maar, that he had sacrificed her on the altar of his art. Her tears and suffering had galvanized his art.

In "Life with Picasso" 2019) by Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Picasso is quoted as saying that he could never have portrayed Dora Maar laughing, "For me, she’s the weeping woman. For years, I have painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me. It was deep reality, not a superficial one."

Michael Diemar is a London-based collector and consultant. He is also editor-in-chief of The Classic, a new free magazine about classic photography. He is a long-time writer about the photography scene, writing extensively for several Scandinavian photography publications, as well as for the E-Photo Newsletter and I Photo Central.