Beyond The Weeping Muse: Dora Maar

at Tate Modern, London (through 15 March 2020)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones

There was a decade in Dora Maar’s life when anything seemed possible. During the 1930s she opened her own studio in Paris with art director Pierre Kéfer. She shared a darkroom with the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï. She showed her work in Dada and Surrealist exhibitions. Her photos began appearing print, from fashion magazines to surrealist catalogues. She worked with May Ray. She met and fell in love with Pablo Picasso.

That the 1930s was a fervent and fertile period for Maar is doubtless. This exhibition at Tate Modern — the most comprehensive retrospective of Dora Maar ever mounted — shows so many works from this period that the effect is almost overwhelming. And the diversity is extraordinary, too: fashion shots of ball-gowned women, flexing athletes, dancers and nudes, experiments with chiaroscuro lighting and clever shadow play that are full of surprising effects. By the second half of the decade she was innovating with the surrealist techniques of photomontage, sandwiching together two negatives and printing them as a unified image. The results are strange, suggestive, and loaded with promise.

And yet, after her meeting Picasso, his apparent influence over her — persuading her to return to her first love of painting and leave photography behind — instigated a change of pace, after which the distinction and range of her creative output appears to ebb away drastically.

Can Picasso be blamed? The exhibition doesn’t point fingers, yet it is the inescapable conclusion given the weight of work that falls just prior to Picasso’s arrival in 1936. Still, perhaps Pablo wasn’t the only factor. The first years of the 1940s were traumatic for Maar: life under Nazi-occupied Paris, a protracted breakup with Picasso, her father’s move to Argentina and the sudden deaths of her mother and her best friend Nusch Eluard. All these are enough to throw an artist out of step.

Born Henriette Markovitch in Paris 1907, by the time she was 25 Dora Maar had changed her name and established a career in commercial photography. The Tate show provides a comprehensive summary of these years, and in doing so rescues her from her more famous role in history, that of Picasso’s “muse.”

At the same time, as her first assignments for fashion magazines, Maar stole away from the studio and took shots in the streets of Paris and…