Prospero | Now you see me

Dora Maar, an overlooked star of surrealism

A new retrospective at Tate Modern celebrates her mesmerising photography and painting

EVEN IN DEATH she could not escape him. Dora Maar’s relationship with Pablo Picasso lasted less than a decade—from 1935 until 1943—but when the photographer died in 1997, he dominated the headlines. The New York Times announced that “Dora Maar, a Muse of Picasso, Is Dead at 89”. The Washington Post declared her a failure, claiming that she “struggled to break free from Picasso’s powerful personality and pursue her own artistic ambitions”. As the subject of his “Weeping Woman” series of paintings, Maar was most famous for being the inspiration for a man who viewed women as (in his words) “machines for suffering”, either “goddesses” or “doormats”.

Maar’s remarkable creative output over a six-decade career is finally getting the recognition it deserves. A new exhibition at Tate Modern is the first retrospective in Britain of her commercial and documentary photographs, surrealist photomontages and paintings. More than 200 pieces are on display; her contribution to 20th-century art can be seen, at last, on its own terms. “All his portraits of me are lies. They’re all Picassos, not one is Dora Maar,” she once told James Lord, an American writer. When Lord retorted that she would always be remembered because Picasso’s depictions of her hung in museums across the world, her response was stern. “Do you think I care? Does Madame Cézanne care? Does Saskia Rembrandt care? Remember that I, too, am an artist. I, too, am familiar with the auspices of posterity.”

Born in 1907 in France, Maar spent part of her childhood in Buenos Aires, where her father worked as an architect, and the rest in Paris, where her mother owned a shop. While studying at the Académie Julian in Paris, she mingled with the city’s artists. (Maar was close friends with Jacqueline Lamba, a painter who later married André Breton, the author of the “First Manifesto of Surrealism”.) In 1932 Maar opened a photographic studio with Pierre Kéfer, a set designer, and a decade of intense productivity ensued. Maar made commercial works for magazines, took photographs of inter-war turmoil in Barcelona and London and created images that brought her much acclaim.

In the surrealist movement, photography was initially considered a medium too closely linked to reality to be useful, but Maar proved it could be used to deceive. One of her most famous works is “Portrait d’Ubu” (pictured), which was displayed in 1936 at the “International Surrealist Exhibition” in London. Its subject, an unidentifiable creature, is somehow both grotesque and gentle; sleepy-eyed and floppy-eared, its arms are curled up by its face. (Throughout her life Maar refused to reveal exactly what she had captured in this image, though experts suggest it may be a preserved armadillo fetus.) Maar showed how photography could fulfil the surrealist goals of exploring the unconscious and the inexplicable as well as any other artistic medium.

Her photographs often look like scenes from vivid yet beautiful nightmares. Eyes peer out vacantly from people’s faces. Body parts are contorted or lie detached in strange places. Unrecognisable figures fill the frame; familiar materials are made strange. Maar had a sharp eye for the absurd and the unusual, and all her work is characterised by playfulness balanced with a certain melancholy.

In an advert for shampoo, for example, Maar transforms the model—her hair covered in soap suds—into a sort of mythical goddess (“Femme aux cheveux avec savon”, 1934). Elsewhere, a bottle spilled on its side does not pour forth shampoo but rich, glossy tresses (Untitled, photograph for Pétrole Hahn advertisement, ca. 1934). In one famous photograph a mannequin’s hand protrudes from the shell of a hermit crab, which sits on a beach below a stormy sky (Untitled, Hand-Shell, 1934. Pictured, top).

Maar’s documentary photography also balances levity and darkness. During the economic depression of the 1930s, she captured the hardships of everyday life in London, the Costa Brava in Catalonia, north-eastern Spain, and “La Zone” in Paris, a deprived area on the outskirts of the city which became home to more than 40,000 people. In one image, a child curls his hands around his eyes to make binoculars while playing in the streets of Barcelona. In others “the pearlies”—Cockney street-traders who sewed thousands of mother of pearl buttons onto their clothes—stand tall like kings and queens in front of her lens.

In telling the story of Maar’s life, the curators at Tate Modern have chosen not to ignore the role played by Picasso. Visitors to the show can hear Maar’s testimony about their life together, and consider the ways her artistic practice influenced him, just as he influenced her (she helped him learn a glass printing technique called cliché verre, while he led her towards painting). But the limelight is hers, and hers alone. “This exhibition is an opportunity to introduce her voice,” says Emma Lewis, one of the show's curators. Neither weeping woman, goddess or doormat, Maar is a transfixing figure. Her work is a strange and exhilarating delight.

“Dora Maar” continues at Tate Modern in London until March 15th 2020

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