Dora Maar Research Paper

After WWI, everything was changing and modernizing, but citizens were still dealing the trauma from WWI. People were still questioning how the leaders they thought were so knowledgeable could have gotten them into something so violent that ruined many lives and families and destroyed the economic system in place. Some people, like the soldiers who had fought in WWI, had lost all their innocents together, ruining their opinion of life. Mentally, people were where they had never been before. Surrealist art was a cure for them to express themselves because it was about mystery, one thing people in the interwar period knew a lot about because they were experiencing the mystery on the new systems they would have to adapt to and the mystery of ideas …show more content…
Maar first got into Surrealism when she met André Breton the leader and force behind surrealism. Maar started to show surrealist tendencies since the early 1930s and was closely associated with surrealists in the mid-1930s.As well, Maar signed many of surrealist manifestos and shared their views. In between 1934 and 1937 she exhibited her surrealist and documentary photos in Tenerife, London at the Galerie de Beaune in Paris. Her clothing reflected surrealism with her non-conformist style. Even one of her photographs, Pere Ubu, was an icon for the surrealist movement. Maar’s art was so liked by the surrealists and reflected them because her eye was attuned to the perpendicular and the odd parts of life. Grotesque (Appendix A), a piece her of artwork, conveyed ideals of surrealism. It was a piece of a disproportional person made up by the mixture of photographed mouth and a drawn face. The mouth looked to be a woman’s and was shiny like the woman was wearing lip gloss and the teeth were white, but not perfectly straight. The drawn part of the face had a big and round face, short curly hair, small ears, and a smushed and blurry nose. These features made it hard to tell who supposed to be in the picture or even what gender the person was. This added to the mystery so valued by surrealists. This piece of artwork reflects surrealism with distension of the mouth and laugh through the teeth. As well as with the disproportion of the face and the combination of real and made up moving the piece into the realm of fantasy and mystery. Inside the mouth, the color of the eyes, and shading around the face is black which suggests a message of nothing inside/ a hollow body which Maar is trying to communicate. This feeling of emptiness an overall theme of people especially soldiers after WWI. They had

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