©Pablo Picasso - Weeping Woman 1937
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Weeping Woman 1937
55x46cm oil/canvas
Fondation Beyeler, Switzerland
The image is only being used for informational and educational purposes
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From Fondation Beyeler, Switzerland:
Following a period from 1924 to 1934 influenced by Surrealism, Picasso continued to employ the ‘surreal’ pictorial idiom he had evolved over those years in the works he produced from 1935 to 1939 and thereafter. Against the backdrop of war, however, they frequently became imbued with a new and distraught undertone. Dream was superseded by nightmare. Besides the work that was influenced directly by events on the world stage (Guernica, 1937), their impact is also felt in the portraits Picasso painted of individuals – in particular of his lover Dora Maar. We sense his preoccupation with these events in the painting and the etching of Weeping Woman, 1937, a type of image that Picasso was originally intending to incorporate in the array of figures in Guernica but then developed as a separate group of works. Whereas the extreme displays of feeling in his works between 1924 and 1934 often mirrored emotional tensions in Picasso’s private life, here the agitated expression grounded in years of Surrealism depicted the shared, universal suffering of people caught up in the horrors of war. Beyond her individual nature, Dora is elevated into a mater dolorosa (Mother of Sorrows) – emancipated from the realm of religion – of the age of ideologies and their consequences.