Dora Maar (born Henriette Théodora Markovitch, Paris, 1907–1997) was a renowned artist within the surrealist movement. She shared professional relations and a friendship with André Breton and other intellectuals and artists of the period.

Dora Markovitch began taking photographs in the late 1920s. She opened a studio in Paris in 1931, where she took portraits of Paris’s cultural milieu, in addition to fashion and advertising commissions. When her professional career started to take off, she decided to sign her works as ‘Dora Maar’.

The New Vision movement in photography emphasised compositions with unusual vantage points, in addition to the quest for beauty in everyday life and objects. Maar’s images are a clear example of this way of looking that displaced pictorialism.

The rise of fascism in Europe during those years led artists to use their works to openly question social and political hostility. In 1933, Maar travelled to Barcelona, where she photographed architecture and people in precarious situations, showing the surrealistic side of life in Spain three years before the Civil War.

A selection of beautiful drawings, both figurative and abstract, made on loose sheets of paper or accounting books, also attest to Maar’s vision of everyday life. She also documented the process of Picasso painting Guernica, an important visual story that helps us better understand the magnitude of this work.

The public knows and admires her surrealistic photographs. However, this exhibition primarily focuses on her street photography and shows relatively unknown drawings from a brief yet prolific period in her long career. Dora Maar was an artist in her own right who photographed, drew, wrote, made collages and painted.