The Weeping Woman

What you are looking at

A woman's head and shoulders fill the canvas. She wears a red hat with a blue flower, her dark hair falls to her shoulder in long blue-black strands, and she holds a white handkerchief to her face with a green hand. The face is broken into hard-edged planes of yellow, green, white and purple. Her eyes, outlined in black, stare out like dishes, and tears are drawn as black teardrops falling from them. At the center, where the mouth should be, the handkerchief and teeth merge into a jagged white shape of shards and lines, as if she were biting the cloth, or as if her face had shattered.

Behind her is a yellow and orange wall and a strip of blue. The colors are bright and almost cheerful, which makes the grief more shocking.

After Guernica

On 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, German and Italian aircraft bombed the Basque town of Guernica. Picasso, living in Paris, responded with Guernica, the huge black-and-white mural shown at the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World's Fair that summer. Among its figures are several women screaming and weeping. After finishing it he kept returning to the theme, making a series of drawings, prints and paintings of weeping women. This canvas, dated 26 October 1937, is the most fully worked and colorful of them.

The model was Dora Maar, the photographer and painter who was Picasso's companion at the time, and who documented the making of Guernica in photographs. Picasso later said that for him she was the weeping woman. Maar herself said that his portraits of her were his inventions, not her.

Close looking

Picasso combines profile and front view in one face, a device from his Cubist years. Look at the eyes: one seen from the front, one from the side. The handkerchief area is the most complex passage: thin black lines cross the white like cracks in glass, and the teeth seem to grind at the cloth. Notice the hand, its fingers drawn as green curves with pale nails, pressed to the face.

The red hat and the blue flower are fashionable, even playful. The contrast between Parisian elegance and unbearable grief is at the center of the picture.

Provenance and where to see it

The English Surrealist Roland Penrose, Picasso's friend and later biographer, acquired the painting soon after it was made. The Tate bought it in 1987 (T05010), and it is usually shown at Tate Modern. Another Weeping Woman of 1937, in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, was famously stolen in 1986 and recovered.

Compare Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror and Le Rêve, also modeled on women in his life, and see Pablo Picasso and Famous Paintings of Women.