DORA MAAR

Dora Maar died in 1997 leaving behind an aura of mystery and expectation . She had been Picasso's lover between l936 and l943, she had photographed Guernica and had been the exceptional model for the series "The crying woman" by the painter from Malaga.

Dora Maar was the daughter of a Yugoslav father and a French mother but had been raised in Argentina. She turned her back on her bourgeois origins by becoming a left-wing political activist who participated in the Contre-Attaque group and was the mistress of the philosopher and revolutionary Georges Bataille.

Being a member of the surrealist group, Paul Eluard introduced him to Picasso. In a famous scene at the café Les Deux Magots, Dora seduced him by playing sticking a razor between her fingers with long red-painted nails. With him he lived a tumultuous passion but also a withdrawal of his creative activity. She became his muse, portrayed a thousand times in her full beauty but above all as a suffering and tormented mask. Abandoned by the artist, she took refuge in religion and painting, living secluded in her apartment in Paris and in her house in Ménerbes, in the South of France.

The author of this biography, Victoria Combalía , had the rare privilege of being able to talk at length with Dora Maar in 1993 and of organizing the first retrospective of her photographic and pictorial work in 1995, as well as having access to family archives with those who can reconstruct, after many years of research, the secret life of this fascinating woman .

Author: Victoria Combalia