Before her life intersected with that of Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar (1907-1997) was already a notable photographer, whom a French critic had dubbed “the brunette image hunter”. It was in 1931 when she, after giving up painting, took the step of opening a professional studio with Pierre Kéfer, changing her real name, Théodora Markovitch, to the more chic Dora Maar. She mostly did portraits and commercial work, but she was also interested in street photography.
In 1933, alone, with the only company of her camera, she traveled to Barcelona. And, from the Hotel Oriente, on the Rambla, where she stays, she gets lost every day through the narrow streets of the Raval, she portrays prostitutes with their pimps, outlandish characters like La Moños, beggars, blind people and smiling vendors from La Boquería. She also visits the Somorrostro neighborhood of barracks, Park Güell and the Sagrada Familia, and later sets off towards Tossa de Mar and S'Agaró.
Many of those negatives slept for decades inside a box that the photographer kept in her house on the rue de Savoie in Paris, from which she rarely left and, when she did, she showed herself to the neighborhood like a grumpy old lady with the permanently crooked wig. Within those walls she had been piling up a lifetime, which, after her death, at the age of 89, ended up scattered in different lots at auctions.
The discovery of the negatives of his trip to Catalonia is an unresolved enigma. Someone could have found them by chance while emptying the artist's chaotic home or, as has happened so many times, they could have ended up in the hands of a ragpicker who found them in the garbage. A year ago they went on sale at the Artcurial gallery in Paris and the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya was able to buy 35 images for 32,500 euros. Now he shows them for the first time in an exhibition, Dora Maar. Trip to Catalonia (until July 20) that is part of the program of the Sant Cugat Light Festival.
The art historian Victoria Combalía, author of a reference biography, knew of the existence of the images, because Maar herself had told her about them in 1994, but she believed that they had been veiled, she could not find them. "Here she took some of the best photographs of her entire production," says the expert, who has also curated the show, to which she contributes a dozen images from her own collection.
He is interested in “the marginalized and the marginalized”, the blind, those closed eyes that interested the surrealists so much and, once in Tossa de Mar, where Marc Chagall, Olga Sacharoff or Otto Lloyd had passed before, he noticed the fishermen and in the women who mend nets protected from the sun under an umbrella, and later he discovered the Xalet Montseny, which would later be demolished to build the S'Agaró urbanization. He also meets a group of intellectuals including the art critic Georges Charensol and the Czech painter Georges Kars. He portrays them in a swimsuit.
