To fill a major Tate show requires a huge talent. Dora Maar didn’t have that
Dora Maar first attracted the attention of Pablo Picasso while playing a rather dangerous game at the celebrated left-bank café Les Deux Magots. She ‘kept driving a small pointed penknife between her fingers into the wood of the table’. From time to time she missed, and a drop of blood appeared on her gloves. This alarming form of digital Russian roulette was the basis for an early work by the performance artist Marina Abramovic, who will be featured at a major show at the Royal Academy next autumn. There is nothing so arresting in the large exhibition devoted to Maar’s work at Tate Modern as the images of the artist