Exhibition of the week Dora Maar
Tate Modern, London SE1 (020-7887 8888, tate.org). Until 15 March
Dora Maar (1907-97) has been largely relegated to a footnote in art history, said Rosemary Waugh in Time Out. She is remembered, dismissively, as a second-tier surrealist photographer, but primarily she is thought of as Pablo Picasso’s lover. For nearly a decade from 1936, Maar was involved in a turbulent relationship with the Spanish master, who painted her many times before unceremoniously abandoning her. Consequently, she has been regarded more as a muse than an artist in her own right – a demeaning status that this “fascinating” exhibition sets out to correct. The show demonstrates that, far from being a minor talent, Maar was a restlessly creative force who experimented in all kinds of formats from her early 20s until her death. Bringing together dozens of portrait photographs, “uncanny” photomontages, paintings and candid urban reportage, it confirms that Maar was “a ridiculously prolific and varied artist” whose legacy demands reappraisal.
Born in Paris as Henriette Theodora
Markovitch, Maar changed her name in early adulthood, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. This reinvention was a taste of things to come. For the rest of her career, she jumped from “style to style”. She started her career as a commercial photographer, producing “exquisite” art deco plates for fashion houses, as well as for the erotic press.
Next she had a “socialist” phase, devoting herself to street photography capturing Paris’s “crumbling shantytowns” and “the London poor begging in front of banks”. Almost immediately, she changed tack again, emerging as a “fullyformed surrealist”, who juxtaposed unlikely imagery to eerie effect: a typical picture from this period might show a “hand emerging from a shell” or a “sticky blob, with talons for hands”. She could be “hilarious”: one image presents a boy in a smart salon urinating so “copiously” that he has turned the floor into a “marsh”.
Things deteriorated when Maar met Picasso, said Gaby Wood in The Daily Telegraph. The latter believed photography was a “lesser medium”, and she turned to painting – a move that would see her condemned as his “inferior”. Some of the paintings are certainly “repetitive”, but after a breakdown in the late 1940s following the end of their relationship, Maar returned to experimental photography, and recaptured the boldness of her earlier work. The final room here presents a series of images she created in the 1980s, consisting of negatives that have been “scratched, painted” and “smeared with chemicals”. It feels like a final “blossoming” of this “remarkable” talent.