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Dora Maar was a modernist and surrealist photographer and painter who left Buenos Aires for Paris as a young woman.  She was Picasso’s lover and muse for ten years but, much better, she made her own inimitable work.  A good selection of this work was shown at the Tate exhibition.

 

Maar’s early advertising photographs are typical of the era and at the same time notable for elegance and grace.  Similarly her nudes have lines and forms which contributed to the fashion and ‘look’ of the time but are a unique result of her photographer’s eye.  Other photography was notable for its atmospheric combinations of figures, particularly figures in the urban landscape.  They exhibit both the Parisian style and the poverty of Paris and elsewhere, particularly of the ‘30’s..

 

As perhaps Picasso’s most famous lover, his portraits of Dora Maar are part of the exhibition.  The dazzling cubist paintings contrast with the monochrome of her more realistic photographs.  Her documentation of Picasso’s Guernica, which of course is also in black and white reminds us today of the horrific times they were living through.

 

The surrealistic photomontages are to me the most interesting aspect of Maar’s work, by contrast with the advertising, the nudes, the urban landscapes and the Picasso documentation.  Tate has done well to put it all together, even the later camera-less photography and some of the painting.  The hand emerging from a shell, as a combination of human and animal, with dramatic and stormy background, was an appropriate image for the show’s publicity.