Picasso's Weeping Woman

There is much scholarly speculation as to the degree to which Pablo Picasso's Weeping Woman series, of which this picture is a prime example, is a meditation on the artist's relationship with his mistress at the time, Surrealist photographer Dora Maar.

While the translation of Maar's distinctive features onto the canvas encourages a reading of the painting as personal working-through of the lovers' tumultuous affair, the painting is more aptly thought of as a continuation of Picasso's response to the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War. In fact the anguished woman seen here echoes the writhing, screaming civilians in Picasso's monumental mural "Guernica," painted to memorialize the senseless bombing of the eponymous village, as well as those brutalized victims depicted in his satiric etching "Dream and Lie of Franco," a searing attack against General Francisco Franco.

With Weeping Woman, Picasso traces the after-effects of widespread violence. Rather than depicting the woes of war directly, Picasso does something perhaps more profound: he vivifies in paint the sadness and sense of despair that follows such inhumanity.

Focusing on female suffering, Picasso underlines the tragedy of those without agency in times of war. With this picture Picasso pushes cubist principles and tendencies to their emotive limits. The woman's face appears distorted with grief.

Her features shattered by loss, the woman cries out as needle-like tears splinter from her teardrop shaped eyes. The harsh palette and angular almost architectural brush-strokes lend a piercing heaviness to the picture. The painting is an exquisite demonstration of Picasso's awe-inspiring ability to create pictures that at simultaneously shock and elicit empathy from viewers.