The exhibition of Dora Maar that is exhibited until March 15 at the Tate Modern in London is announced as the most comprehensive presented on the surrealist photographer so far. With good judgment, the exhibition delves into the unique brightness of this artist, wishing to dissolve that lump that seems to accompany the story about her figure: her love relationship with Picasso . Dora Maar was the most charismatic muse and lover of Malaga, and this passive and suffering role often eclipses other facets of the artist, such as the brilliant publicist, experimental photographer and modernist woman.

Dora Maar was born in Tours in 1907 daughter of a Croatian architect and a French violinist. Maar would be known during the 1930s through his photomontages, compositions made with photographs that will eventually become famous icons of surrealism. His talent for generating disturbing and magnetic images allows him to start working in the field of commercial photography and fashion. One of Maar's great landmarks is located here, as an introducer of the surrealist ideology in the world of advertising. Maar's commercial photographs were innovative, experimental and very successful .

In parallel to this commercial aspect, Dora Maar also took street photography like her colleagues Cartier-Bresson or Brassaï. In these snapshots, Maar portrayed the most popular and humble facet of urban life: children playing in the street, blind, homeless ... Her camera captured representative images of the city during the economic depression of Europe with which she positioned next to the town and in front of the powerful.

We reached a key point: 1936, Café Deux Magots. Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso know each other, she with 29 years, he with 55 . When Maar comes to Picasso's life, he exerts a kind of rescue effect at a time when he was suffering from a severe creative blockade. The exhibition in the Tate Modern results in this, in the mutual influence between the two above the customary account of Picasso's psychological abuse of Dora Maar that will cause her to end up slipping down the slope of depression.

During the turbulent affair that would last about eight years, the artist would document the creation of her most political work by the painter, the Guernica, photographing at the foot of the canvas and offering a privileged view of her work process. Little by little, Maar abandons the photograph and moves on to Cubist painting, even making copies of paintings from Malaga . Meanwhile, Picasso uses it as a model in the series The Woman Who Cries. These prints will be attached to the figure of Dora Maar as a kind of testimony of the stormy relationship between both artists.

During this period, Dora Maar stimulates Picasso's political awareness, and educates him in photography. but little by little, his personal work goes out until he becomes paralyzed. The break comes in 1944, when Picasso takes a new lover. Dora begins to have a neurotic behavior and ends up being admitted to a sanatorium. The film Dora Maar, despite Picasso directed by Victoria Combalía and Alejandro Lasala in 2014 delves into this dark phase that would open for Dora Maar after the break-up, a stage that would evolve into a life apart from society. Picasso would buy him a house in the French town of Ménerbes and Maar will move to live there, ceasing any social relationship.

In the solitude of his French mansion, Dora Maar would resume his artistic activity. Take up the paint and try many different styles and techniques. In the 80s, he would return to experimental photography, capturing abstract images definitely far from reality. The Tate Modern exhibition shows more than 20 works from this little-known period of cameraless photographs, made in a dark room with photographic emulsions. Maar, voluntarily isolated and living in precariousness, was buried in 1997 in a simple funeral to which no more than six people attended .

Dora Maar had a sad ending and the common consensus has blamed Picasso for this decline. You have to be careful with these Manichean visions. The personal scope of Picaso's influence on Dora Maar is something that cannot be judged, and yet, both in Dora Maar's life and in that of, for example, Frida Kalho, it seems that it is difficult for us to separate her artistic work from her sentimental life, assuming an incontestable cause-effect relationship between the two. The exhibition at Tate Modern prefers to offer a vision of mutual nutrition in that relationship between Maar and Picasso. If we reject the sentimentality of the artistic story, the image of Dora Maar will be erected, beyond the topic of the woman who cries, as it was: a first-rate photographer and painter , a professional woman with an enormous talent that shines with your own light

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • culture
  • art
  • Photography
  • Pablo Picasso

CULTURE Hema Madoz and the art of routine

Culture Cartier-Bresson, the Shanghai gold rush and panic over the siege of Mao

Culture Miguel Rodríguez-Acosta donates 145 works to the documentary fund of the foundation of which he is honorary president