Dora Maar: A Subversive Life

Dora Maar Untitled (Hand-Shell) 1934 © Estate of Dora Maar / DACS 2019

'All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.’
Andre Breton, Surrealist Writer

I recently attended a fine exhibition of the art of Dora Maar (Tate Modern, London until 15 March).

Henriette Theodora Markovitch was born in 1907 and raised in Argentina and France. Her French mother owned a fashion boutique and her Croatian father was an architect. She studied art in Paris and gradually developed an enthusiasm for photography. In 1931, with director and set designer Pierre Kefer, she opened her first studio. And she changed her name to Dora Maar. 

Initially many of Maar’s assignments were in fashion and advertising. Between the wars there was a burgeoning interest in women’s style, health, and fitness. As consumption grew, so did the appetite for bold, arresting images. This was a time when advertising walked hand-in-hand with contemporary art. 

Maar was naturally inventive and had an eye for the unusual and uncanny. A woman washes her hair and the lather takes on an alien quality. A lady removes her smiling face as if it were a mask. A model’s head is replaced by a sequinned star. 

Cecil Beaton Dora Maar behind one of her works, in her studio at 6 rue de Savoie, Paris 1944 Musée Picasso (Paris, France) © The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s

In one striking image Marr hand-painted elaborate tattoos onto an elegantly attired woman. For an anti-aging cream she superimposed a spider’s web over a model’s face. She had a talent for subversion.

‘Nothing is as strange as reality itself.’
Brassai, Photographer

Maar was active in left-wing politics at the time and developed an interest in street photography. Recording the poverty on the edges of Paris, travelling to Catalonia and London, she sought out the strange sights that surround us in everyday life. A wicker kangaroo wearing boxing gloves stands watching the traffic. A legless mannequin looks out from a first floor window. A suited man disappears beneath the pavement. 

'The unconscious must reign through the intellect.’
Eileen Agar, Surrealist Painter and Photographer

Maar established close relationships with the Surrealist movement that was then based in Paris and she became one of the few photographers to be included in their classic exhibitions of the 1930s. The Surrealists celebrated the power of the unconscious mind. They were fascinated by the revolutionary force of dreams, and believed that the associations we bring to everyday objects reveal our unconscious desires.

Dora Maar, The years lie in wait for you (around 1935). The William Talbott Hillman Collection © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019

Photography had hitherto mostly been a medium of fact and rationality. But in Maar’s hands it was a vehicle for subjectivity and fantasy. Through extreme close-ups and bold crops she challenged the viewer to look afresh. Through unexpected contexts and dramatic angles she made cryptic images that questioned logic and common sense. Through carefully constructed photomontage she created bizarre and exotic new worlds.

A two-headed calf sits atop a classical fountain. A hand emerges from a conch shell on a beach. Eyes float across a gloomy sky. A child bends backwards on an inverted stone vault. And a baby armadillo regards us with sinister detachment. 

Maar teaches us to challenge rationality and convention at every turn; to construct and deconstruct; to subvert people’s expectations - of ourselves and the world around us. If we want to catch the eye, to arrest attention, to provoke thought, we need to see the strange in the everyday. We need to stop making sense.

Dora Maar, Man Looking Inside a Sidewalk

From the late 1930s Maar pursued painting as an artistic outlet. She created cubist portraits, sombre still-lives and melancholy landscapes. And then in her seventies she returned to photography, her first love, making a series of photograms – camera-less images produced by placing objects on photo-sensitive paper. With these moody abstractions, sometimes scratched and over-painted, she was asking questions to the last. 

Maar died in Paris in 1997, aged 89.

In support of International Women’s Day (8 March), this piece was written without any reference to Dora Maar’s famous partner.

'Isn't it strange?
Isn't it strange?
I am still me.
You are still you.
In the same place.
Isn't it strange?
How people can change
From strangers to friends,
Friends into lovers,
And strangers again.’

Celeste, ‘Strange’ (C Waite / J Hartman / S Wrabel)

No. 270

Exquisite Corpse: If You Want To Change the Product, Try Changing the Process

'Nude Cadavre Exquis' Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, Man Ray (1926-27)

‘There’s a method to my madness; and a madness to my method.’
Salvador Dali

At a gallery recently I came across an Exquisite Corpse.

Exquisite Corpse was a creative technique that Surrealist artists adapted from the traditional parlour game of Consequences. Typically four people took turns to draw a different bodypart on a folded piece of paper: first the head, then the torso, then the hips and finally the legs. Each participant was unaware of what the previous contributors had drawn. The image that resulted was often comic, disturbing, absurd.

Exquisite Corpse at first struck me as a curiously playful distraction for serious artists. Just a bit of fun perhaps before they got back to proper work. But the Surrealists were serious about the technique. For them it illuminated the creative process: it was a way of exploring the impact on their art of multiple authorship, sequencing, chance and the unconscious.

For Surrealists process didn’t have to be a constraint on creativity; it could be a catalyst to it.

'La Clairvoyance'Rene Magritte

‘All my life my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.’
Andre Breton

The writers and artists of the Surrealist movement gathered in Paris in the 1920s around their leader, Andre Breton. In the wake of the horrors of the First World War, they determined to suppress reason, reality and ‘bourgeois aestheticism.’ Like Freud they were interested in dreams and the workings of the unconscious mind; in juxtapositions and coincidences; in everyday strangeness.

In particular the Surrealists experimented with the process of creation, disrupting traditional practice at every opportunity. They adopted techniques like ‘automatism’: writing and drawing at random without rational or conscious control. They set up the Bureau of Surrealist Research to record the dreams of the general public. They created collages that integrated found material, text from popular novels, images from magazines and encyclopaedia. They untethered objects from their names and practical functions. They experimented with photography as an art form.

For the Surrealists new techniques provided a springboard to new acts of creation. Process inspired product.  

‘I’ve never been able to finish a detective story because I don’t give a hang who was the murderer… It doesn’t interest me at all. It’s the mental processes that interest me.’
Man Ray

'Object' Meret Oppenheim

In the world of commercial creativity we tend to regard process with ambivalence. It’s boring but important; a necessary evil. We often characterise it as something to be avoided or reduced as far as possible; as an enemy of creativity.

Working at BBH for many years, I was quite taken with its distinctive belief in ‘processes that liberate creativity.’ This seemed a more mature position. I learned that process protects time, prevents misunderstanding and wasted effort. It generates alignment within a team, harnesses creativity to a commercial agenda and optimises the chances of great outcomes. I learned to be respectful of roles and responsibilities, of sign-offs and the sequencing of actions. I learned that process can be the creatives’ friend.

But the idea of ‘processes that liberate creativity’ goes beyond commercial efficiency. As the Surrealists suggested, new processes can inspire new ideas. They can be a fuel for the imagination. They can provoke change.

So processes should not be engraved in granite. They should be constantly questioned and evaluated, rewritten and reformulated.

How can we accelerate and stimulate innovation? Why not change the brief, change the team, change the time, change the meeting? Let’s investigate new combinations and partnerships. Let’s crash the procedure and crunch the schedule. Let’s test and trial, experiment and explore.

At times of transformation we should all be looking to disrupt incumbent ways of doing things; to invent new models, modes and techniques. Not just so that we can cut costs or increase speed; but so that we can create fresh routes to original ideas; novel sources of imaginative thought.

If you want to change the product, try changing the process.

‘Freedom is not given to you – you have to take it.’
Meret Oppenheim

No. 131