I will be excerpting sections of my essay from the Dali Museum catalog, The Subversive Eye: Surrealist and Experimental Photography from the David Raymond Collection, published in 2024.

My Subversive Eye-part 3

Late 1990s—Paris

While living in San Francisco, I would fly to New York as often as possible to look for works to add to my collection. On one trip, I was visiting Phillips auction house, which at the time, was located on East 79th Street. The front counter had catalogs of upcoming sales from other auction houses around the world, including a sale in Paris of works by Dora Maar. She had died the year before, 1997, and it was a sale of all of her possessions. I knew only a few images by Dora, but was immediately mesmerized and knew that I had to go to Paris to see the work and purchase some, if I could. Amazingly, another member of Foto Forum, Mary Daniel (‘Danny’) Hobson, was a Dora Maar expert and had written her master’s thesis on her. She was also going to the Paris sale.

Dora Maar was known to me as the inspiration for Picasso’s Weeping Woman series; for the story of her stabbing between her gloved fingers to impress him; for creating some Surrealist icons of photography and collage; and mostly for documenting the creation of Guernica and for being Picasso’s doormat. It was quite obvious that she was much more than that. Supposedly Picasso once told her that photographers were just frustrated painters. What a pompous jerk.

Danny Hobson told me of a major retrospective at the Bancaja Foundation in Valencia in 1995, organized by the scholar Victoria Combalía, who had known Dora. Danny had written an essay for the catalog. Other than that and a 1990 show at Galerie 1900–2000 in Paris, nothing much had been shown since the 1930s. In fact, Dora told the Paris gallery that the works they were selling were all she had. Maybe she had forgotten about them under her bed?

After seeing the sale preview in Paris, it was quite obvious that Dora deserved much more attention and acclaim than she had received in her lifetime. Little did I know that I would become one of her champions. I ran into a group of French dealers that I knew and told them I intended to buy some of her works—they thought I was crazy. With my limited budget, I decided to focus on a few things, but I looked at everything as I wanted to understand her work as best I could. The preview was surprisingly haphazard, given the importance of her work and her collection of Picassos. I remember asking to see pieces out of the cases and frames, and being given a look as if I was an alien.

On the evening of the sale, I was relying on the bid board, a device set up behind the auctioneer with the different major currencies. It changed with each bid. As my French was all but non-existent and the bids were going too fast for my wife Marcia to translate, I relied on the board. Just as the first lot that I was interested in came up for bidding, the board stopped working… I decided to just keep my paddle up while the bidding increased. When the auctioneer’s hammer came down, I asked the person sitting next to me, ‘What did I just pay for that?’ They responded, ‘Vous êtes fou!’ (‘You’re crazy!). That photograph, Blind Man Holding a Bowl, and another from that evening, Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand, are now in the CMA collection. Those two and another Kingdom variant (which I later gifted to the Getty) are all I could afford to buy. I was content.

The following year, there was another auction in Paris of more material and what unsold items from the first sale. I was determined to purchase as much as I could. I flew back and went to the preview. There were a number of lots containing multiple photographs, not illustrated in the catalog. You had to be there to purchase the work. Many dealers and collectors from around the world once again attended the sale. I ended up buying more than twenty pieces and happily carried them all home. At that sale, I noticed a very elegant older gentleman wearing an ascot tie, who had outbid me on a number of items. He came over after I acquiesced on a lot and thanked me, introducing himself. His name was Roger Thérond. He was the editor of Paris-Match and had a great collection of vintage photographs. He coined the phrase ‘le poids des mots, le choc des photos’—‘the weight of the words, the shock of the photos.’ He knew many of the greats personally and owned masterpieces by all of them. He invited me and Marcia to his home for tea on our next visit to Paris. Which we took him up on. Over tea and pastries (not over the photographs, though), he brought out boxes of some of his favorite works by Man Ray, Dora Maar, and Maurice Tabard, among others.

In the months after the second Dora Maar sale, quite a few galleries began to exhibit her work and her vision was beginning to be seen by more people. In the years that followed, I lent works by her to many museum exhibitions globally. In 2010, I met the curator Amanda Maddox. She explained that she wanted to curate a major Dora Maar retrospective. Her determination led to a show that opened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2019, traveled to Tate Modern in London and was supposed to go to the Getty (where she became a curator of photographs) in 2020. Unfortunately, the Getty show was cancelled because of Covid-19. During that time, I also got to know Damarice Amao, from the Pompidou, who has been very helpful in sharing her knowledge about Dora’s work and the work of other Surrealists. I continue to add works by Dora to the collection and always knew that she would be seen for being more than a mistress of Picasso’s.—TO BE CONTINUED….