Dora maar

A new retrospective at London’s Tate Modern is shining a light on the surrealist’s underrepresented work as an experimental photographer and painter

These women were intelligent, charismatic and unconventional – far more than just muses.

Dora Maar is mostly remembered as Picasso’s muse and lover, but his portrait of her as the Weeping Woman, bordering on madness, detracts from her singular work as a prominent photographer of the surrealist movement. Henriette Théodora Markovitch was born to a French mother and...

Dora Maar

Brian Dillon on work of the the Surrealist photographer Dora Maar, who had a relationship with the artist Pablo Picasso and documented the painting of “Guernica.”

The erotic, the exaggerated and the elegant are interwoven in all the accounts of Dora Maar’s meeting with Picasso in 1936...

Brian Dillon on work of the the Surrealist photographer Dora Maar, who had a relationship with the artist Pablo Picasso and documented the painting of “Guernica.”

History remembers her as Picasso’s muse but Maar was an unflinching artist who infiltrated the surrealists’ boys club – and helped paint Guernica

Maar's photographic experiments reject the pretense of naturalism in straightforward photography and attempt to achieve something much deeper than resemblance.