The Weeping Woman, 1937 by Pablo Picasso, is for sale on Artsy.
The Weeping Woman is a silent protest at the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by Germany during the Spanish Civil War.It makes Rubens suffer more in a single face than in an entire Crucifixion.
A woman with blue teeth and piercing black eyes is deeply upset.The baby died in the bombing.The woman has jagged lines on her face.There is a combination of bright colors and dark colors that represent the death and shock of this woman.
The painting is about the violence that we feel when we look at it and how it is translated into the paint.
The Weeping Woman went on an international tour to promote the plight of the Spanish Republic.Since it was shown here in 1938, it has been part of British historical memory.
The English artist bought this painting from Picasso in Paris in the late 30s.The canvas is not large but it packs a punch.There is a bust of a Spanish woman wearing a mantilla.Picasso created an indelible image of mortal grief with just six colors and black and white.
The bean-shaped head is surrounded by dense blackness.The flattened forms of the mantilla give the sense of compression.
The woman has bright white skin.Her face is flushed with hot magenta and her lips are green.Her red-orange hair hums against the greens of the mantilla while her yellow blouse shrieks in the background.The silhouette of a plane can be seen in her eyes.
The handkerchief is a dramatic invention.The lines in the eyes are shaped like teardrops.Picasso has a handkerchief next to a crumpled cloud of scribbled pencil lines.The painting has distorted images and an expressionism vibe.
Dora Maar, Picasso's model, suffered a huge loss during the war.Her loss is displayed through angles, lines and colour in the oil on canvas painting.Dora has a mix of blue and black hair.He used the shallow space to give depth while acidic green and shades of mauve created the appearance of loss.
The Weeping Woman is a painting by Picasso.It was painted within a week or two of completion of his famous picture of the fascist bombing of Guernica, a picture to which the small canvas bears an apparent relationship.
Picasso did not paint faces that portrayed intensely descriptive emotion.There is a series of weeping women in about 60 drawings, prints and paintings.
The Spanish Civil War and the artist's complicated romantic life come from the intersection of political and personal events.
The Weeping Woman series is believed to be a continuation of the tragedy depicted in Picasso's painting.Picasso focused on the image of a woman crying instead of painting the effects of the Spanish Civil War directly.
German aircraft destroyed the town at the request of the Spanish National Commander, Mola.The capital of an independent city was given to the Basques by the Republican Government of Spain.The world's press took the razing as an example of Fascist barbarity.
Picasso's insistence that we imagine ourselves into the face of this woman, into her dark eyes, was part of his response to seeing newspaper photographs of the bombing of Guernica.
The Weeping Woman came at the end of a series of paintings, prints and drawings that Picasso made in protest.It has very specific Spanish sources.Picasso's mother wrote to him in May 1937, saying that smoke from the fighting made her eyes water.The weeping Virgin is a traditional image in Spanish art, often represented in lurid elaborate sculptures with glass tears, like the one that flows towards this woman's right ear.The family home was made by Picasso's father.
The model for the entire series was Dora Maar, who was a professional photographer when Picasso met her in 1936; she was the only photographer allowed to document the successive stages of Guernica while Picasso painted it in 1937.Picasso's partner from 1936 until 1944 was Dora Maar.Picasso painted her in many guises during their relationship, from realistic to benign.
He was the most influential artist in the first half of the twentieth century.He was associated with Cubism, along with Georges Braque, and made significant contributions to Symbolism and Surrealism.
His sculpture was influential and he explored areas as diverse as printmaking and ceramics.Picasso was influenced by the likes of Edvard Munch and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.His depictions of beggars, prostitutes, and various urban misfits were shaped by this tendency.
The influence of Paul Cézanne and Henri Rousseau, as well as archaic and tribal art, encouraged Picasso to lend his figures more weight and structure around 1906.They set him on a path towards Cubism, in which he dismantled the conventions of perspectival space that had dominated painting since the Renaissance.These innovations would change attitudes to the depiction of form in space for the better.
He abandoned the idea of the picture as a window on objects in the world and began to conceive of it as an arrangement of signs that used different, sometimes metaphorical means.This would be influential for decades to come.Picasso had a liberal attitude to style, and although his work was usually characterized by a single dominant approach, he often moved interchangeably between different forms.
During the early 1920s, when his style was mostly classical, he encountered a new expressionism that had been suppressed throughout the years of Cubism.The soft forms and tender eroticism of his portraits of Marie-Therese Walter, as well as the stark imagery of Guernica, the century's most famous anti-war painting, were enabled by this development.
Picasso was always eager to place himself in history, and some of his greatest works, such as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, refer to a wealth of past precedents.As he matured, he became more conscious of assuring his legacy and his late work is characterized by a frank dialogue with Old Masters such as Ingres, Velazquez, Goya, and Rembrandt.
Picasso did not join the armed forces for any side or country during World War I, the Spanish Civil War, or the second world war.He was friendly with activists within the Catalan independence movement, but he remained away from it during his youth.
Picasso was in his fifties at the time of the Spanish Civil War.He was not expected to fight in World War II because he was older.Picasso was not compelled to fight against the Germans in either World War.In the Spanish Civil War, service for Spaniards living abroad was optional and would have involved a voluntary return to their country to join either side.
The Spanish Civil War inspired Picasso's first political work, The Dream and Lie of Franco, which was produced for propagandistic and fundraising purposes.The postcards were intended to raise funds for the Spanish Republican cause.
The Weeping Woman was toured in England to build support for the Republican cause in the Civil War.The tour was organised by a man.Around 15,000 people attended the opening week of the British gallery.The admission price was a pair of boots for the Republican Army.They were laid out in front of the town.
Picasso joined the French Communist Party in 1944 after attending an international peace conference.Picasso was a member of the Communist Party until his death, despite the fact that he received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government.
Picasso stated in a 1945 interview that his painting is Communist art....I wouldn't hammer my shoes in a way to show my politics if I were a shoemaker.His Communist sympathies, common among continental intellectuals and artists at the time, have long been the subject of some controversy.In the late 1940s he told Picasso that he didn't approve of his joining the Communist Party and his stance against Stalin.
The intervention of the United Nations and the US in the Korean War was depicted in a painting by him.