In her Portrait of Père Ubu, Maar created one of Surrealism’s most striking images. Using extreme close-up and dramatic lighting in an otherwise unmanipulated photograph, she made a nightmarish apparition from a baby armadillo. Both horrific and comical, it is a fitting embodiment of Père Ubu, the obese blundering monster Alfred Jarry created in his notorious play Ubu Roi (1896). Surrealist photographs were also used to reveal the strangeness of the world we think we know, often by simply presenting it in a new way. Dora Maar titled her photograph of a baby armadillo after the anti-hero of Alfred Jarry’s famously transgressive and iconoclastic play Ubu Roi (1896), which was much admired by the Surrealists. The close-up image of the animal’s unfamiliar form is startling in itself, but by connecting the armadillo to Père Ubu, Maar created an emotional resonance for viewers familiar with the character. Suddenly, the small animal is transformed into a large, greedy, and violent human being — what was perhaps merely strange becomes monstrous. This is possible in part because of the way the photograph distorts our sense of scale by close-cropping and isolating the animal within the frame.

Père Ubu
gelatin silver print
1936
Dora Maar (1907-1997)
France

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