Père Ubu (1936)

Maar, Dora (1907-1997)

Père Ubu
1936
Gelatin silver print, 39.7 x 29.2 cm
Metropolitan Museum of ArtNew York

The Surrealist artist Dora Maar is better known as Picasso‘s dark-haired model and companion in the late 1930s than for her astonishing works. Her incarnation of the bestial nature of man is titled after the infamous and absurd dictatorial antihero of Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi (1896). Maar‘s imaginative evocation of the pear-shaped, breast-plated Ubu in the monstrous reality of a baby armadillo is one of the most compelling and repellent of Surrealist photographs. (MET)