"On the verge of establishing herself as one of the rising figures of the Parisian art scene, Dora Maar nevertheless stopped exhibiting her work in 1946. The break with Picasso and the psychic crisis that followed are the reasons frequently cited to explain her silence and her near ten-year absence from the walls of Parisian galleries. Dora Maar, however, never stopped working. Alongside meditation and prayer, painting was part of the daily disciplines that helped her regain emotional and spiritual stability, as attested by her personal notebooks and notes preserved in her archives. Dora Maar nevertheless refused to show her work and even destroyed a good number of her experiments [...].

At a time when abstraction was asserting itself in all its facets - Surrealist, of the French tradition, or lyrical - she declared in 1955 that abstraction "leads to a wall", convinced of the necessity of staying in contact with nature.

Less than a year later, Dora Maar qualified her position, at the same time inaugurating a new chapter in her practice, now focused on landscape and the boundaries of abstraction. In 1956, the exchanges undertaken with André Du Bouchet for the collection of poems Sol de la montagne appear to have been decisive in the artist's transformation, now nearly 50 years old (repr. p. 162). The poet, who regularly collaborated with artists often coming from the abstract movement such as Pierre Tal Coat or Jean Capdeville, found in the artistic dialogue offered by these books material with which to exploit the plasticity of his poetic language, reduced to its purest form. Walking, crossing the landscape, and the emotions felt in the face of the spectacle of nature structure the writer's poetic experience. This exploration of landscape echoes Dora Maar's discovery of the Luberon region and the village of Ménerbes, where the house Picasso helped her acquire in 1945 is located.

[...]

The light of Ménerbes, the dialogue with Du Bouchet and with other painters questioning the representation of landscape, such as Nicolas de Staël, who was also settled in the region, led Dora Maar down paths of landscape painting bordering on the language of abstraction. After several years of absence and experimentation, Dora Maar formalised her new pictorial start at the Galerie Berggruen in 1957, with the support of an influential figure of the time: the British modern-art collector and art historian Douglas Cooper, who wrote the catalogue text. Colline, Montagne, Vallée [Hill, Mountain, Valley], the titles of the paintings recall Dora Maar's attachment to the reality of a territory that she recomposed in her Paris studio from drawings and watercolours made on the spot during excursions in the Luberon.

Her desert landscapes, in which sky and earth occupy equal parts of the canvas in broad masses of colour, provided occasions to pursue the liberation of gesture and the revelation of pictorial matter begun in Sol de la montagne. These were placed in the service of emotional visions of landscape also dear to some of her contemporaries, such as de Staël, her friend Jacqueline Lamba, Georges Braque, and an entire generation of abstract landscape painters."

Excerpt from Damarice Amao, "Peinture Obligée", in Dora Maar (catalogue of the Centre Pompidou retrospective, 2019).