Dora Maar

I went into this book knowing next to nothing about Dora Maar, the cover enticed me and I wanted to learn something new. This book is meant to accompany an exhibition traveling to Paris, London, and Los Angeles. This book goes through the history of the artist, touching on key relationships and formative experiences that shaped and moved the direction of her art.

I appreciated the beautifully arranged images of Maar's work, which mapped out the progression of her style and mediums over the years. I found myself wishing that her art had been better cataloged, better cared for, and better recognized during her lifetime. How unfortunate that she was creating during a time when women were seemingly more valued for their relationships to men than to their craft.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wanted to learn more about an artist you may not have heard of, but who was creating consistently and prolifically throughout their life. Dora Maar is so much more than Picasso's Weeping Woman and worth a look. The photographs of her work are fantastic, even if you can't catch the upcoming shows.

Dora Maar lived in that magical time when, as one person said, "everybody knew everybody." And she traveled in an amazing circle that included Henri Cartier Bresson, Andre Breton, Pablo Picasso, Brassaï, Jacques Prévert, Max Morise, Simone Weil, Jean Renoir, and Georges Bataille.

This book chronicles the varied stages of her career, from street photography to magazine work to surrealist images, to documentary photography (including photographing Picasso as he worked on "Guernica"), to her own painting. This volume covers the best of these works.

My own favorite is her street photography which is spontaneous and alive. The magazine work is equally fine and compares to some of the best of the times. The surrealist works are interesting but others did it better. And I am less enthusiastic about the paintings, which seem overly derivative.

But overall this is a fine collection and deserving to be in any photo book collector's library. Much of this work has not been published before and as a group establishes her as an important photographer.

I was excited to find not one but two new books about Dora Maar on #NetGalley this year after reading "The Age of Light" last year. The women of surrealism are getting their due. Dora Maar is a well researched volume filled with the gorgeous work of this little known surrealist photographer.