Dora Maar, Tate Modern
As galleries across the world begin to address the historical imbalance of representation of male and female artists we are starting to see more and more retrospectives of female artists who have been side-lined in the past. The artists who suffer this fate the worst are the artists who had the misfortune of being in a relationship with a famous male artist. Late last year we saw Lee Krasner get an exhibition at the Barbican and the large retrospective allowed us to see her as more than just Jackson Pollock's missus. Now it's the Tate's turn as they host the "most comprehensive retrospective of Dora Maar ever held".
The first room in the show greets us with a wall of portraits of Maar from her close friends and fellow photographers. As we are shown throughout the exhibition, the circle she resided in was hugely important to the work she made. Next we see a selection of promising photographs and prints by Maar that show quite a bit of experimental manipulation, including bleaching, double exposures, scratching and other darkroom tricks that blend different and strange images together to make a sort of collage of textures and scenes. This kind of photographic play is exciting and I expected to see lots more of this kind of work later on in the show, however this particular type of work by Maar didn't actually materialise which was a bit of a disappointment.
The next room displayed a collection of different examples of Maar's commercial work. Surprisingly, she took a lot of photographs for erotic magazines early in her career. Maar's touch turned what could have been soulless softcore porn into series of artistic and interesting nudes.
Much to my dismay, the majority of the work that bulked out the exhibition was Maar's commercial work, most of it simple portraits of celebrities or adverts for products. I can see that she was a very skilled photographer and I can imagine she set the standard for a lot of commercial photography in her time (and lord knows it's a million lightyears away from the awful commercial photography we see today) but it didn't really keep me engaged as I'm not interested in the world of marketing and advertising. That being said, there was some truly creative decisions made in her work for some products, such as the hair pouring out of a bottle.
Next the exhibition brought us to the documentary style photography Maar kept up most of her life. We saw scenes of the political upheaval in Europe at the time and documentation of the stark poverty many people were living in. This made for some emotive and powerful images that washed the commercial photos out of our mouth.
Following on from this series of work, we saw Maar's move into surrealism. Some of the images we saw in Maar's documentary photography reappear in collages Maar began to make. I found these collages to be the most exciting work in the show. The photographic nature of the figures in the collages helping to add a level of reality to what are very unreal images. A dreamlike atmosphere is crafted in each image, with bodies draped and curved and spread in dramatic positions, and an unsettling undertone pervades.
Although the Tate made an effort to let us know this was Maar's show and that she was no longer being simply looked at as Picasso's muse, they had to cover the infamous relationship that dramatically changed her life. There was a display of photos Maar took of Picasso and a few paintings by him, including the famous 'Weeping Woman' portrait of Maar which served to show the tumultuous relationship they shared.
Picasso encouraged Maar to paint and a small collection of her paintings were included in the show. As a painter, they didn't particularly interest me, they didn't feel all too unique or impassioned. They weren't bad, she was a good painter, but it felt like her skills really lay in constructing scenes by conducting real objects and people within photography.
After Picasso left Maar, she was left in a deep depression that lasted quite a long time, and her later paintings reflected her meditations at the time, calm and gentle landscapes without the fiery, restless experimentation she displayed before meeting Picasso.
The final room displayed Maar's return to photography and a return to energetic experimentation. Although I wasn't personally that fond of her late-life darkroom work, I could see she had finally gotten back to the core of her practice. My issue with this late work was that I had been waiting for more of her early darkroom experiments that I saw at the beginning of the show, and after wading through lots of commercial imagery and painting, I finally encountered her return to the darkroom and her work had become completely abstract. The later work was much more concerned with pattern and mark-making and the manipulation of figures and atmospheric scenes had gone.
All in all it was a well curated show and I am glad I got to see it. Dora Maar was clearly a multitalented and restless creative. She could turn her hand to many areas of art-making and display a good understanding and skill. The takeaway for me was witnessing her real power in using photography to collide distorted figures and dreamlike spaces to make psychologically loaded scenes and it was about time she was given the large retrospective she deserved.
FINAL NOTES
-The blue lightboxes the Tate installed to display negatives were fun and looked great.
-The best image in the whole show was definitely Pere Ubu. It's a funny photo with a funny backstory. I respect the sense of humour Maar had in making and sharing this piece. The little creature was a sort of mascot for the surrealists, becoming one of the most celebrated images to come out of their camp and displayed in all their landmark exhibitions. When it was first displayed it garnered shock from the audience, in 1936 the average European hadn't seen a creature that looked anything like this before. Maar kept quiet when asked about what it was, enjoying the confusion and guesses about what this little armoured alien baby was and if it was even real. It is now believed to be an armadillo foetus preserved in formaldehyde. The little guy was named after Ubu Roi, "the absurd, potty-mouthed tyrant in Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play of the same name. Jarry’s modern man is a fat, greedy fool, ruled by temper tantrums" (The Guardian). The creature is unsettling but also quite vulnerable and kind of cute in a way and makes for an amusing piece from a woman with a good sense of humour in a time in which it was hard for female artists to be taken seriously.
The first room in the show greets us with a wall of portraits of Maar from her close friends and fellow photographers. As we are shown throughout the exhibition, the circle she resided in was hugely important to the work she made. Next we see a selection of promising photographs and prints by Maar that show quite a bit of experimental manipulation, including bleaching, double exposures, scratching and other darkroom tricks that blend different and strange images together to make a sort of collage of textures and scenes. This kind of photographic play is exciting and I expected to see lots more of this kind of work later on in the show, however this particular type of work by Maar didn't actually materialise which was a bit of a disappointment.
The next room displayed a collection of different examples of Maar's commercial work. Surprisingly, she took a lot of photographs for erotic magazines early in her career. Maar's touch turned what could have been soulless softcore porn into series of artistic and interesting nudes.
Much to my dismay, the majority of the work that bulked out the exhibition was Maar's commercial work, most of it simple portraits of celebrities or adverts for products. I can see that she was a very skilled photographer and I can imagine she set the standard for a lot of commercial photography in her time (and lord knows it's a million lightyears away from the awful commercial photography we see today) but it didn't really keep me engaged as I'm not interested in the world of marketing and advertising. That being said, there was some truly creative decisions made in her work for some products, such as the hair pouring out of a bottle.
Next the exhibition brought us to the documentary style photography Maar kept up most of her life. We saw scenes of the political upheaval in Europe at the time and documentation of the stark poverty many people were living in. This made for some emotive and powerful images that washed the commercial photos out of our mouth.
Following on from this series of work, we saw Maar's move into surrealism. Some of the images we saw in Maar's documentary photography reappear in collages Maar began to make. I found these collages to be the most exciting work in the show. The photographic nature of the figures in the collages helping to add a level of reality to what are very unreal images. A dreamlike atmosphere is crafted in each image, with bodies draped and curved and spread in dramatic positions, and an unsettling undertone pervades.
Although the Tate made an effort to let us know this was Maar's show and that she was no longer being simply looked at as Picasso's muse, they had to cover the infamous relationship that dramatically changed her life. There was a display of photos Maar took of Picasso and a few paintings by him, including the famous 'Weeping Woman' portrait of Maar which served to show the tumultuous relationship they shared.
Picasso encouraged Maar to paint and a small collection of her paintings were included in the show. As a painter, they didn't particularly interest me, they didn't feel all too unique or impassioned. They weren't bad, she was a good painter, but it felt like her skills really lay in constructing scenes by conducting real objects and people within photography.
After Picasso left Maar, she was left in a deep depression that lasted quite a long time, and her later paintings reflected her meditations at the time, calm and gentle landscapes without the fiery, restless experimentation she displayed before meeting Picasso.
The final room displayed Maar's return to photography and a return to energetic experimentation. Although I wasn't personally that fond of her late-life darkroom work, I could see she had finally gotten back to the core of her practice. My issue with this late work was that I had been waiting for more of her early darkroom experiments that I saw at the beginning of the show, and after wading through lots of commercial imagery and painting, I finally encountered her return to the darkroom and her work had become completely abstract. The later work was much more concerned with pattern and mark-making and the manipulation of figures and atmospheric scenes had gone.
All in all it was a well curated show and I am glad I got to see it. Dora Maar was clearly a multitalented and restless creative. She could turn her hand to many areas of art-making and display a good understanding and skill. The takeaway for me was witnessing her real power in using photography to collide distorted figures and dreamlike spaces to make psychologically loaded scenes and it was about time she was given the large retrospective she deserved.
FINAL NOTES
-The blue lightboxes the Tate installed to display negatives were fun and looked great.
-The best image in the whole show was definitely Pere Ubu. It's a funny photo with a funny backstory. I respect the sense of humour Maar had in making and sharing this piece. The little creature was a sort of mascot for the surrealists, becoming one of the most celebrated images to come out of their camp and displayed in all their landmark exhibitions. When it was first displayed it garnered shock from the audience, in 1936 the average European hadn't seen a creature that looked anything like this before. Maar kept quiet when asked about what it was, enjoying the confusion and guesses about what this little armoured alien baby was and if it was even real. It is now believed to be an armadillo foetus preserved in formaldehyde. The little guy was named after Ubu Roi, "the absurd, potty-mouthed tyrant in Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play of the same name. Jarry’s modern man is a fat, greedy fool, ruled by temper tantrums" (The Guardian). The creature is unsettling but also quite vulnerable and kind of cute in a way and makes for an amusing piece from a woman with a good sense of humour in a time in which it was hard for female artists to be taken seriously.
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