Lot Essay
I knew Dora Maar in the Thirties, a beautiful girl and an accomplished photographer, some of whose work showed originality and a Surrealist approach. Picasso fell in love with her. One day in my studio he saw a portrait I had made of her and he begged to have the print.... (Man Ray, Self Portrait, p. 179)
"There are two professions," he said, "whose practitioners are never satisfied with what they do: dentists and photographers. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and every photographer would like to be a painter. Brassaï is a very gifted draftsman, Man Ray is a painter of sorts, and Dora, too, was right in the tradition. Inside Dora Maar, the photographer, was a painter trying to get out." (Pablo Picasso as quoted in Françoise Gilot's Life With Picasso, p. 85)
The myth of Dora Maar is one of the more enduring legends of the Surrealist legacy persisting to this day. A personage of wild reputation, she was until recently better known as Picasso's lover than as an artist in her own right. She was the woman Picasso became attracted to after the birth of his daughter Maya with Marie-Thérèse Walter, precipitating the dissolution of that involvement. Signaling the end of his relationship with Dora Maar was his affair with Françoise Gilot, whose 1964 memoir quoted above is subject to some question due to the time and events passed between the supposed conversation and publication. Today, Dora Maar's artistic career has been resurrected to some degree but she is still more a product of myth than of fact. The popular characterization of her as an intelligent, creative, attractive and emotionally unstable woman stems significantly from her involvement with Picasso. (See: Brigitte Léal's ""For Charming Dora": Portraits of Dora Maar", pp. 385-407 in Picasso and Portraiture for more on the correlation between Maar's persona and Picasso's portraits of her.)
Born Henriette Dora Markovitch in Paris in 1907, her mother was French, and her father a Yugoslavian architect of some success. The family spent most of her childhood in Argentina while her father worked on commissions. After taking course work in 1927 at André Lhote's academy in Montparnasse, then at the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs she took up photography studies at l'École de Photographie de la Ville de Paris. Around 1930 until 1934 she shared a studio and photo credits with Pierre Kefer, a family friend. After leaving school Maar approached Man Ray seeking work as an assistant. While unable or unwilling to give her work, Man Ray did avail himself to her for advice. What was to ensue however, neither one could have predicted at the time.
Dora Maar met Picasso for the first time at the Café Deux Magots, one of the centers of Surrealist café life, in the autumn of 1935. If one is to believe the now often repeated story, as it is told in Gilot's Life With Picasso, it was an auspicious introduction, full of the flair of a proper Surrealist greeting. It certainly was an event that would cement Dora Maar's reputation in Surrealist circles and may very well be the impetus behind Man Ray's portrait of her.
Pablo told me that one of the first times he saw Dora she was sitting at the Deux Magots. She was wearing black gloves with little pink flowers appliquéed on them. She took off the gloves and picked up a long, pointed knife, which she began to drive into the table between her outstretched fingers to see how close she could come to each finger without actually cutting herself. From time to time she missed by a tiny fraction of an inch and before she stopped playing with the knife, her hand was covered with blood. Pablo told me that was what made up his mind to interest himself in her. He was fascinated. He asked her to give him the gloves and he used to keep them in a vitrine at the Rue des Grands-Augustins, along with other mementos. (op. cit., pp. 85-6).
Dora Maar was well acquainted with Man Ray as part of the Surrealist circle. With Picasso, she spent the summer of 1936 in the company of Man Ray and Ady (Adrienne Fidelin), Paul and Nusch Eluard, and Lee Miller among others in Mougins, near Cannes. That summer Man Ray began a series of ink drawings that would, in the next year, be published with Paul Eluard's poems as Les Mains libres. A later drawing from that year, now missing, titled L'Evidence is based on the portrait offered here. In it, her hands remain a prominent aspect of the composition. (Perpetual Motif, p. 43, fig. 33).
While the Surrealist lexicon was replete with references to hands and gloves, only Man Ray, upon learning of Maar's exploits with the blade, could concoct a composition employing seemingly separate hands and fingers while adding to the allure of this fantastic persona. Though Maar hides her left hand with her right, a sixth finger extrudes as an unnatural digit. Her ring finger disappears above the joint, severed and solarized.
"There are two professions," he said, "whose practitioners are never satisfied with what they do: dentists and photographers. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and every photographer would like to be a painter. Brassaï is a very gifted draftsman, Man Ray is a painter of sorts, and Dora, too, was right in the tradition. Inside Dora Maar, the photographer, was a painter trying to get out." (Pablo Picasso as quoted in Françoise Gilot's Life With Picasso, p. 85)
The myth of Dora Maar is one of the more enduring legends of the Surrealist legacy persisting to this day. A personage of wild reputation, she was until recently better known as Picasso's lover than as an artist in her own right. She was the woman Picasso became attracted to after the birth of his daughter Maya with Marie-Thérèse Walter, precipitating the dissolution of that involvement. Signaling the end of his relationship with Dora Maar was his affair with Françoise Gilot, whose 1964 memoir quoted above is subject to some question due to the time and events passed between the supposed conversation and publication. Today, Dora Maar's artistic career has been resurrected to some degree but she is still more a product of myth than of fact. The popular characterization of her as an intelligent, creative, attractive and emotionally unstable woman stems significantly from her involvement with Picasso. (See: Brigitte Léal's ""For Charming Dora": Portraits of Dora Maar", pp. 385-407 in Picasso and Portraiture for more on the correlation between Maar's persona and Picasso's portraits of her.)
Born Henriette Dora Markovitch in Paris in 1907, her mother was French, and her father a Yugoslavian architect of some success. The family spent most of her childhood in Argentina while her father worked on commissions. After taking course work in 1927 at André Lhote's academy in Montparnasse, then at the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs she took up photography studies at l'École de Photographie de la Ville de Paris. Around 1930 until 1934 she shared a studio and photo credits with Pierre Kefer, a family friend. After leaving school Maar approached Man Ray seeking work as an assistant. While unable or unwilling to give her work, Man Ray did avail himself to her for advice. What was to ensue however, neither one could have predicted at the time.
Dora Maar met Picasso for the first time at the Café Deux Magots, one of the centers of Surrealist café life, in the autumn of 1935. If one is to believe the now often repeated story, as it is told in Gilot's Life With Picasso, it was an auspicious introduction, full of the flair of a proper Surrealist greeting. It certainly was an event that would cement Dora Maar's reputation in Surrealist circles and may very well be the impetus behind Man Ray's portrait of her.
Pablo told me that one of the first times he saw Dora she was sitting at the Deux Magots. She was wearing black gloves with little pink flowers appliquéed on them. She took off the gloves and picked up a long, pointed knife, which she began to drive into the table between her outstretched fingers to see how close she could come to each finger without actually cutting herself. From time to time she missed by a tiny fraction of an inch and before she stopped playing with the knife, her hand was covered with blood. Pablo told me that was what made up his mind to interest himself in her. He was fascinated. He asked her to give him the gloves and he used to keep them in a vitrine at the Rue des Grands-Augustins, along with other mementos. (op. cit., pp. 85-6).
Dora Maar was well acquainted with Man Ray as part of the Surrealist circle. With Picasso, she spent the summer of 1936 in the company of Man Ray and Ady (Adrienne Fidelin), Paul and Nusch Eluard, and Lee Miller among others in Mougins, near Cannes. That summer Man Ray began a series of ink drawings that would, in the next year, be published with Paul Eluard's poems as Les Mains libres. A later drawing from that year, now missing, titled L'Evidence is based on the portrait offered here. In it, her hands remain a prominent aspect of the composition. (Perpetual Motif, p. 43, fig. 33).
While the Surrealist lexicon was replete with references to hands and gloves, only Man Ray, upon learning of Maar's exploits with the blade, could concoct a composition employing seemingly separate hands and fingers while adding to the allure of this fantastic persona. Though Maar hides her left hand with her right, a sixth finger extrudes as an unnatural digit. Her ring finger disappears above the joint, severed and solarized.