Amar Singh Art Gallery shows Dora Maar in a new light with an exhibition of her rare photographs

Amar Singh Art Gallery is displaying the work of artist Dora Maar with an exhibition of the rare photographs recently discovered in her estate. The art gallery is seeking to re-establish her as a pioneering surrealist artist in her own right, as the exhibition opened on June 16.

Maar is renowned as Pablo Picasso’s “weeping woman”, the anguished lover who inspired him to repeatedly portray her in tears.   , including two extraordinary portraits of him from the 1930s and one charting the creation of his anti-fascist masterpiece, Guernica, in his studio surrounded by paint pots.

Talking about Maar and her work, Amar Singh, curator of the exhibition at the art gallery, said, “When Dora met Picasso, she was already a gifted artist and her surrealist photographs were considered revolutionary. But Picasso was extremely controlling and psychologically abusive, and she was discouraged by Picasso to continue with her photography.”

In 1934, Maar was one the few women who had signed “Appel à la lutte”, a tract calling on French people to fight fascism, and in 1935, she had joined the anti-fascist Contre-Attaque union of revolutionary intellectuals alongside the surrealist André Breton. Applauding her influence, Amar Singh said, “She ­influenced Picasso to paint Guernica – he had never entered political painting before. I don’t think Guernica would have existed without Dora Maar. Yet she’s been completely eradicated out of that narrative.”

During the Depression, Maar captured blind street peddlers, shopworkers and street children in evocative black-and-white photographs. She taught Picasso some of her photographic techniques and encouraged his political awareness. One of the photos in the exhibition at Amar Singh Art Gallery shows Maar was given exclusive access to Picasso’s studio to photograph the progress of his painting of Guernica. She even painted some of the dying horse in the painting, at Picasso’s request.

Yet, Maar was always discouraged by Picasso to follow her passion, and eventually his disloyalty and the discouraging got to her. “While he’s discouraging her away from surrealist photography, she’s encouraging him and pushing his artistic boundaries in a way which completely reshaped the history of art,” said Amar Singh, adding that even though Picasso painted Maar more than 60 times, usually in tears, he left Maar for her next mistress and that “¬psychologically traumatised Dora and she eventually had a nervous breakdown.”Maar was taken to a psychiatric hospital and received electric shock therapy, and eventually turned to a life of religious seclusion and ceased photography. “She would wake every morning looking at his work and was never able to love again. Their relationship decimated her,” said Amar Singh, adding that by exhibiting her work at the art gallery they want to get her the recognition she deserved.