Dora Maar was born Henriette Theodora Markovitch in Tours in 1907, and went with her family to Buenos Aires in 1910. In 1926 she studied painting and photography in Paris at the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs, the École de Photographie and the Académie Julian. In the 1930s she moved in Surrealist circles, and was in close contact with André Breton, Paul Élouard and Man Ray. In addition to avant-garde and fashion photographs, she documented social conditions in Barcelona, London and Paris, turning increasingly to Surrealist imagery. Her photomontages became more and more disturbing. In 1936 her work was represented in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, and in that same year she met Pablo Picasso, whose muse, model and lover she would be for the next eight years. After parting from Picasso in the 1940s she suffered from depression. She devoted herself to painting still lifes and landscapes. For twenty-five years she did not show her work, and from the early 1970s she lived in seclusion. It was only in 1990 that her paintings and photographs were again shown at the Galerie Marcel Fleiss in Paris. She died in Paris in 1997.
