The impossible monologue of Dora Maar by Carlo A. Borghi – 2018
Description: Henriette Theodora Markovitch was born in Paris in 1907 to a Croatian architect and a Parisian fashion entrepreneur: a fertile environment for the growth of a young woman determined to become an artist.
She grew up in Buenos Aires where she began to paint, but at the age of twenty she returned to Paris and it is the encounter with photography that freed her talent. She was commissioned works from various fashion magazines and adopted the stage name Dora Maar, with which she made herself known throughout Paris. Anti-conformist and talented, she made her way in an artistic world hostile to women.
In addition to “commercial” work, Maar focused on street photography, representing the suffering of people encountered through film editing and manipulation. Techniques that were appreciated by the greatest artists of the time – Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Breton, Brassaï… – opening the doors of the circles of the surrealists and the great exhibitions.
In 1935, she met Picasso and began a relationship with him that would soon become toxic. Despite having collaborated on some of Picasso’s works, including Guernica – not only as a model – Dora Maar, due to the continuous pressures from Picasso, stopped photographing and from being an artist in her own right she transformed into a silent muse.
In 1944, Picasso interrupted the relationship, but Dora Maar did not resume photographing. After a long time, she resumed painting, but she will no longer exhibit. She died in Paris in 1997.
The evident fame that has consecrated Picasso and relegated Maar to the shadows is not only yet another wrong to her talent, but also an emblematic story of domination and possession of a man over a woman within a relationship that should be loving; domination that also annihilates her in the social and professional sphere.