The Dora Maar House

Located in Ménerbes, one of the most beautiful villages in France, this 18th century town house was the property of General-Baron Robert (1772-1831), a native of Ménerbes who received numerous honors during the Napoleonic wars in Spain, and was bought in 1944 by Dora Maar, surrealist artist and photographer. Companion and muse of Picasso from the late 1930s to the early 1940s, following their breakup Dora spent each summer in solitude in Ménerbes. After her death in 1997, an American arts patron, Nancy Brown Negley, bought and renovated the house to create a residency for writers, academics and artists.

Since 2007, the ‘Nancy B. Negley Artists Residency Program’, based at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France, has offered residencies of one to two months to mid-career arts and humanities professionals to focus on their areas of expertise. The program was originally directed by Katherine Howe along with the Brown Foundation and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

At the beginning of 2020, Mrs. Negley created the Nancy B. Negley Association under the aegis of the Fondation Mérimée and gifted the Hotel de Tingry (a classified historical monument) and the Dora Maar House to the Fondation Mérimée. The Fondation Mérimée are the owners of the two buildings while the Dora Maar Cultural center occupy them and run the programs.