Dora MAAR

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Status, price and estimation of the artist Dora MAAR

Price of a photo of Dora Maar: 600 – 80,000€.

Estimate for a drawing or watercolour by the artist at auction: 150 – 1,000€.

Artist’s rating for the sale of a painting: 250 – 10,000€.

If you wish to have a photograph of the artist appraised, our photo experts are at your disposal for a free valuation.

Who is Dora MAAR?

Dora Maar, original name Henrietta Theodora Markovitch (Marković), (born November 22, 1907, Paris, France, died July 16, 1997, Paris), was a French surrealist photographer and artist whose career and accomplishments were overshadowed during her lifetime by the details of her affair with Pablo Picasso. Since her death, her work has been resurrected and re-examined in a more reflective way.

The influence of Pablo Picasso on her artistic work

Maar was particularly apt at deconstructing her own hidden and dizzying emotional interior – and the desire to get away from it. Unfortunately, Maar gave up photography because Pablo Picasso insisted that every photographer is just a painter waiting to be liberated. Caught up in the love affair with this colossal and powerful personality between 1935 and 1945, Maar became a muse to others as well as a practising artist herself.

After her separation from Picasso, Maar had a nervous breakdown and recovered with the help of the famous psychiatrist Jaques Lacan. Later in life, she left Paris for rural Provence and painted mainly abstract landscapes and melancholic still lifes.

She became a recluse and a devout Catholic. Despite her achievements, after their destructive relationship, Maar lived partly in the shadow of Picasso’s words; she never returned to photography, the medium through which her exquisite and unusual character shines so brightly.

An artist of surrealism

While making his most ‘surreal’ photographs, Maar examines similar and recurring motifs to the other members of the group, for example hair, shells, spirals and shadows.

However, her images are altogether more disconcerting, macabre and disturbing than those of her colleagues and thus underline the fact that Maar was not only linked to André Breton, but also a close friend of the dissident figure, George Batailles. With a foot in both camps, she literally stood at the centre of the movement that was sweeping the art world at the time.

Indeed, she was one of the women closest to the Surrealists, involved in many early collaborative drawings and collages, and loved for her imagination. When Breton opened a gallery on rue de Seine in 1937 under the name ‘Gravida’, the ‘d’ stood for Dora, recognising her as one of the few most valuable sources of inspiration in the ensemble.

A recognition that took time, a key artist today

Maar did not exhibit at all for almost 25 years. Her work was reintroduced in 1990 with “Dora Maar: Old Works”, an exhibition of her photographs and paintings at the Galerie Marcel Fleiss 1900-2000 in Paris. A major exhibition followed in 1995 in Valencia, Spain. After her death in 1997, the contents of her houses in Paris and Ménerbes (France), which included her own works and those of Picasso, were auctioned.

Since Maar’s death, his work has been the subject of numerous group exhibitions, solo exhibitions and new grants.

In 2006, her house (La Maison Dora Maar) in Ménerbes opened as a retreat for writers, scholars and artists as part of a programme administered by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Appraise and sell a photograph by Dora Maar

If you own a Dora Maar photo, ask for a free estimate via our online form.

You will then be contacted by a member of our team of experts and auctioneers to give you an independent view of the market price of your painting. In the event of a sale, our specialists will also advise you on the various options available to sell your work at the best price.