Dora Maar. The photographer.

t was Pablo Picasso's partner. Yes and what? Does that determine her talent? Does it enhance or reduce her capabilities? Dora Maar died 24 years ago and even now she is still better known for her role as lover and muse of the Malaga artist than for her talent as a photographer.

Dora was born in Paris on November 22, 1907 with the name Henriette Theodora Markovitch. Her father Joseph was a Croatian architect and her mother, Julie Vosin, a French violinist. Her family was the first to oppose her romantic relationship with Picasso, whom she met at the legendary café Deux Magots in 1936, shortly before the Spanish Civil War broke out. She was introduced by the poet Paul Elouard. She was 29 and he was 55.

Their meeting was a momentary lifeline for both of them. She had lived hell with the writer Georges Bataille. "He was the one who hurt me the most," confessed Maar years later. He lived with the Swedish Marie-Thérèse Walter, Maya's mother, although he was still married to Olga Khokhlova, Paulo Picasso's mother.

The young Parisian is defined as a "complex and problematic" person but also "strong, intelligent and politically committed" at a time when the world was constantly shaken by one tragedy after another. Picasso painted her on several occasions, usually sad, dull, with tears in her eyes.

The couple broke up in 1943 when the Spanish artist replaced his still young lover by another even younger, the painter François Gillot (born 1921).

It was always said that Dora Maar flirted with madness after that traumatic breakup and that she went through several psychiatric hospitals, where they even applied electroshocks, until she was secluded in her Parisian apartment on rue de Savoie, far away and apart from the world until she died in 1997. However, an exhibition from 2014 contravened this version. The exhibition featured more than one hundred photographic works, some unpublished, as well as negatives and letters from the French artist. She “she had an instinctive inclination towards the mysterious, the magical and the supernatural” that she captured, in the mid-thirties, in enigmatic works, both photos and paintings and sculptures, the organizers highlighted then.

Maar was educated at the André Lothe Academy, where she met fellow photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who was a year younger. "She was an extraordinary photographer," Cartier-Bresson said of her. "In her work there is always something very startling and something very mysterious," he added.

From a very young age, Dora was introduced to the most avant-garde circles of Paris in the 20s and 30s, where she ended up opting for the surrealists. Her photographs of losers and excluded from society were highly valued by experts.

The day he met her, Picasso already saw that Dora Maar's character was strong and impulsive. She was playing with a razor that she usually carried in her purse. She ran it quickly through her fingers, even cutting herself. The painter from Malaga was enchanted by her and ended up asking for her gloves full of her blood, as explained in a book by her published in 2013.

Years later, it was Dora Maar who captured the Guernica production process with her camera. The painting evolved before the photographer's Rolleiflex camera from a gigantic sketch to a masterpiece. She lived then hidden under the elongated aura of Picasso.

Hers of hers is the disturbing Père Ubu, an alleged armadillo fetus that became an icon of surrealism and that was exhibited at the end of 1936 at the MoMa in New York alongside works by Bosco, Goya and Leonardo Da Vinci. Despite her relative seclusion after breaking up with Picasso, Dora Maar continued to experiment with photography.