Dora Maar at Tate Modern

Because my packet of museum cards and memberships dropped out of my bag last week, I'm going round to various places to get replacement cards. Today, to Tate Modern.

Once there, new card in hand, what to go see, to make the journey worthwhile? If you're feeling a bit listless, the Dora Maar exhibition (to 15 March)is perhaps not the best choice. Or I just wasn't in the mood for lots of monochrome photographs, and did not find much that grabbed me, even among her later paintings.

She worked as a photographer in the 1930s (she was born in 1907) and the early photos - some very small - were displayed to advantage in large frames behind thick, well-cut mounts. 

Making much from little

Large-format negatives were interesting, or was it just that they introduced some colour?

Dora Maar's hands

A dress masquerading as a tattoo, c1935

The shadows of nudes are what I'll remember from the exhibition, perhaps because I've just been looking at the "ladies and vases" by Charlotte Hodes -

And of the model, Assia Granatouroff -

 A "fashion and beauty" photocollage for magazine illustration - rather sinister, perhaps because of the turbulent white impasto painted background, revealed (accidentally?) in the hand -

We know Dora Maar mostly through her relationship with Picasso and his "Weeping Woman" painting, and the exhibition includes a little book of little photographs of him, put into little pockets. The album has an interesting structure, and is perspexed to the nines -

There's a fair bit of surrealism - and the main Surrealism room has been painted an almost irridescent shade of pink. I hurried through that one.