Dora Maar at the Tate Modern on the 26th January 2020

Dora Maar at the Tate Modern on the 26^th January 2020

Dora Maar seems an obvious figure worthy of recognition, her role in 20^th century art a site of revision.  She is known publicly as Picasso’s muse, his portraits of Dora Maar are, indeed, included in this exhibition.  However, Picasso is not the subject here.

A heroine of Surrealism and Modernism, Maar was born in 1907, the daughter of a Croatian émigré and a French mother who was also a devout Catholic.  Her father was an architect who moved the family to Buenos Aires in 1910 but returned to Paris in 1926.  Maar was born Henrietta Theodora Markovitch, in Paris she enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Julien and embarked on a career as a fine artist.  She quickly traded this career for the life of a photographer, changing her name to Dora Maar, in order to exploit commercial possibilities in fashion, advertising and erotica.  Maar realised the inherent possibilities in the new medium, she also committed herself to documenting social conditions as her political awareness began to grow.

By 1932 her first photographic studio had opened but by the end of the 1930s she had returned to painting.  Maar was not tied down by financial necessity since she came from a wealthy family but somehow defied convention to re-invent herself as a photographer, sharing a dark room with photographer Brassai (1899-1984).  To be independent she revolutionised her own image and was a subject for many artists and photographers, such as Cecil Beaton, Brassai, Rogi Andre and Irving Penn.  She assisted fashion photographer Harry Ossip Meerson (1911-1991) and set up a studio with director and film-set designer Pierre Kefer near Paris.  By 1934 Maar was working on beauty product advertisement for clients like Ambre Solaire and hair care brand Petrole Hahn.  One of her notable works was The Years Lie in Wait for You (Les annees vous guettent, c.1935, photograph, gelatin silver print on paper (photomontage).  The photomontage was created by sandwiching together two negatives, one of Maar’s close friend Nusch Eluard and the second, a spider’s web.  They were then printed as one unified image.  As well as Eluard, Maar worked with Ukrainian model Assia Granatouroff (1911-1982).  Granatouroff was born in the Ukraine but moved to France in her early childhood.  After working as a seamstress her ambition was to be a film actress but with the occupation of France by the Germans Granatouroff changed her name to the more French-sounding ‘Granatour’.  Maar’s photographs of Granatouroff demonstrate her creative use of sets, lighting and camera angles to make images that have a strongly Expressionist sense.  They later circulated in art publications and erotic magazines.  The latter were an important source of income for photographers like Maar.

Maar pioneered the art of collage, creating images by juxtaposing two or more photographs. She documented the devastating social consequences of economic depression throughout the 1930s.  By 1933 she had travelled to the Costa Brava in Catalonia, a potent time with Spain on the brink of Civil War and then she travelled to London in 1934.  She photographed a ghetto known as ‘La Zone’ on the outskirts of Paris, an undeveloped area where 40,000 citizens resided, which was later demolished.  Maar declared herself a committed fellow traveller of the Left, ‘I was very much on the left at 25…. not like now.’  In later life Maar gravitated towards the devout Catholicism passed down to her by her mother.  However, in the 1930s had signed up to Appel a la lute (Call to the Struggle), the manifesto launched by surrealist poet Andre Breton (1896-1966) and screenwriter Louis Chavance (1907-1979) in response to the rise of the far right in France.  She was an associate of Georges Bataille (1897-1962), a philosopher and social critic who initiated the anti-fascist movement Contre-Attaque (Counter-attack).  Furthermore, she became involved with the leftist theatre troupe Groupe Octobre.

Maar also documented Paris in works like After the Rain (Apres la pluie, 1933, photograph, gelatin silver print on paper) which has a poetic intent but resembled Eugene Atget’s photographs of Paris.  These had a documentary impulse, recording old parts of the city that were disappearing under modernisation.  Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) bought Atget’s archive and brought it to the attention of the surrealists.  After the Rain was published in the literary magazine Le Phare de Neuilly (The lighthouse of Neuilly) launched by surrealist poet Lise Deharme (1898-1980).

The form of this exhibition mainly imitates the heroic biography of fellow artists like Picasso.  Maar is an image maker who is connected to the most successful of Picasso’s images, the ‘weeping woman’, not simply a portrait but a metaphor for the suffering of the Spanish people.  Before her meeting with Picasso, Maar had already begun to gravitate towards the surrealist movement in art.  It was possible that her interests in fashion and advertisement coincided with the indirect approach to social transformation favoured by the surrealists and a further engagement with both Communism and Psychoanalysis.  Since surrealism depicted the internal estrangement of subjects, it was not initially apparent how photography, a realist medium, could be incorporated into its aesthetic.  In works like Portrait of Ubu, 1936, Maar depicts the anti-hero of Alfred Jarry’s work, a hideous creature emerging from the darkest night (which is now known to be a photo of an armadillo’s foetus).  Maar had forged a surrealist photographic aesthetic in such works and was one of the few photographers included in the major surrealist exhibitions shown during the 1930s in Tenerife, Paris, London, New York, Japan and Amsterdam.  Moving on from Brassai’s declaration ‘Nothing is as surreal as reality itself’, Maar sought to depict the mythic basis of Paris, influenced also by the work of Eugene Atget (1857-1927).

Maar completed an important photo journal of Pablo Picasso’s work on Guernica.  By the late 1930s she had returned to painting and moved to the south of France.  She painted still lives and landscapes completed in water colours.  Finally, she came back to photography and began to expose objects to light sensitive paper, a process which insists on solid, abstract forms.

Tate Modern, January 26^th, 2020