Beyond the tears

The brilliant, innovative photographer at the forefront of Surrealism was much more than merely Picasso’s mistress, says Matthew Dennison

- Matthew Dennison

POSTERITY frequently distorts, both its verdicts and its remembering unreliable. In the case of Dora Maar, currently the subject of a large-scale retrospective at Tate Modern—the first in this country and a joint undertaking with Paris’s Centre Pompidou and the J. Paul Getty Museum in California—she is chiefly remembered as Picasso’s mistress and the ‘weeping woman’ of a number of portraits he created in the late spring and early summer of 1937. ‘Dora, for me, was always a weeping woman,’ Picasso commented on the artist, who died at the age of 89 in 1997, and so she has survived into a new century. Picasso’s schematic, deconstructed, vigorously coloured profile portraits of Maar— stricken expression, tears like spilt seeds or shards of glass— conferred on her a distinctive immortality that is successfully challenged in this exhibition, which seeks to present the entirety of Maar’s long and varied career as an artist.

That career has obvious appeal for the ‘MeToo’ generation eager to redress the balance between the sexes that has typically celebrated male achievement more fully than female. Maar was admired and celebrated—and had enjoyed a degree of commercial success—before she met Picasso. Indeed, the bulk of her most distinctive work predates their relationship.