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In 1933, the French art critic Jacques Guenne described Dora Maar as “a brunette huntress of images”, his loaded language giving some idea of the stereotypical ways in which ambitious women photographers were viewed. Like her contemporaries, Lee Miller and Germaine Krull, Maar seems to have thrived on the challenges of being a gifted woman in a predominantly male medium, constantly shifting her approach as she absorbed, and utilised, the shifting currents of the art world in the 1930s.
Her life’s work, as mapped out in this epic and constantly surprising retrospective, led her from fashion photography into erotic portraiture, street photography, surrealism and beyond into landscape painting and a late dalliance with experimentalism in the form of abstract camera-less photography. Born Henriette Markovitch in 1907, she changed her name in 1932, soon after shifting from painting to photography, and opened a studio in Paris with art director Pierre Kéfer. It was the beginning of a creative journey that would bring her into contact with some of the leading artistic figures of the time, from Brassaï, with whom she shared a darkroom, to Man Ray and the surrealists, whose work would have such an impact on her own development, moving her from portraiture to experiments in collage and photomontage.
In 1935, she crossed paths with Picasso, with whom she would go on to have a turbulent relationship that she never quite recovered from. Famously, she was the model for one of his best-known, and most anguished, portraits, Weeping Woman (1937), a depiction that would, for so long, define her even more than her own extraordinary creativity. Even in the obituaries that followed her death in 1997, she was still being referred to as “Picasso’s muse.”
This fascinating show, spanning nine rooms, is a meticulously mapped-out reappraisal of Maar’s long and restlessly inventive creative journey. As if to establish her as a “modern woman” of the time, a wall in the first room is given over to often striking portraits of her by the likes of Brassaï, Beaton, Lee Miller and Irving Penn as well as a handful of more artful self-portraits. These images suggests a gilded life – which the rest of the show in many ways undercuts.
Among the early surprises are several erotic nudes, male and female, that were first published in the 30s in various revues des charmes (erotic magazines) with such titles as Seduction and Secrets du Paris. One of her subjects was Assia Granatouroff, a statuesque beauty who was also a model for Krull. Maar renders Assia’s athletic form as a living sculpture, all curves and looming shadows. The most striking portrait is also the most sinister: an almost fetishistic portrait of Assia wearing a skin-coloured face mask and hanging by one arm from a gymnastic ring. It hints at the subconscious territory of Maar’s later photomontages, made in the mid-30s, which evoke dark dreamworlds influenced by the writings of her acquaintances, the poet Paul Eluard, the transgressive writer George Bataille and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
Maar’s shifts in style were often dramatic. The surrealist pictures are preceded by several series of street photographs made in Paris, Barcelona and London. They are dark in every way, their subject matter the urban poor, their style starkly monochrome. On a London street, an old woman sells lottery tickets beneath the steel pillars of a bank on Oxford Street. Another younger woman cradles an infant in a shawl, who faces a landscape of uncertainty. Behind her is a sign for an astrology booth. Another series moves from the photojournalistic to a kind of low-key observation of the ordinary: an image of a recently rain-drenched street beneath a wall dappled with shadows is bisected by the pavement edge that runs from bottom left to top right. A similar geometry of lines and shapes defines a street portrait made in Barcelona, in which a hunched figure in the left foreground stands facing away from her camera. These are ordinary, but oddly haunting, street photographs that seem as mysterious in their own quiet way as the surrealist experimentation.
Her experiments with large-format negatives, all eerily blue silhouettes, seem utterly contemporary, while her photos of street protests in Paris in February 1934 echo recent upheavals in the city. She also photographed many of the leading figures of the surrealist movement, including Eluard and the painter Leonor Fini, but the most startlingly surrealist image here is Ubu (1936), a closeup of what was later identified as an armadillo foetus, its title taken from Alfred Jarry’s absurdist play, Ubu Roi. There is something alien, yet oddly human, here that disturbs still.
The show moves inexorably towards Maar’s romantic entanglement with Picasso, who first spotted her in Les Deux Magots cafe in Paris, as she repeatedly stabbed a knife between her black-gloved fingers, occasionally drawing blood. Picasso is said to have kept the blood-splattered gloves. Their temperaments were ill-suited and, after a time, her independent streak seems to have provoked rages in him. As an artistic coupling though, it proved fruitful, particularly for him: an entire room is devoted to his renderings of her in pencil and paint, while another shows her photographs of the making of his famous painting Guernica. He became more politically engaged though her radicalism. His portraits move from relatively calm depictions of her to almost vengeful distortions of her features.In 1945, when he replaced her with Françoise Gilot, Maar fell into a deep depression, for which she underwent electroshock treatment and was, for a time, a patient of Lacan.
Her later paintings, hanging in one of the final rooms at Tate Modern, suggest a deep calmness, whether Morandi-like still lifes or small, deftly-rendered landscapes. In Ménerbes in the south of France, she lived the life of a recluse, devoutly practicing the Catholicism she had been raised in. Her paintings fascinate, though perhaps as much for what they suggest about her becalmed later life and all that went before.
In this context, the experimentation that marked her late return to photography comes as something of a shock. The abstractions here were produced by furiously scratching her negatives, overlaying them with paint or creatively defacing them with acid. As a final artistic statement, they are defiant. Restless to the end, Maar never lost the creative impulse to experiment and, though doing so, reinvent herself.
• Dora Maar is at Tate Modern, London, from 20 November to 15 March.
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