La vie picasso analysis

On view

Paris,

Oil, charcoal and sand on canvas

50 × 61 cm 

Museo Picasso Málaga. Gift of Bernard Ruiz-Picasso

One of the genres with which Pablo Picasso experimented the most was portraiture. He reinvented this apparently classical field, challenging any trace of academicism or apparent normativity. During these years Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar, then both part of Picasso’s life in some way, appeared in his works. Dora Maar was recalled in several of Picasso’s writings as the weeping woman.

‘[…] devilishly seductive in her disguise of tears and smartly hatted by the blows of fate andouille stripper of wrong-doings and perfect knight sweating fear forgetting himself in the clouds […]’.

Pablo Picasso’s writing, 18 Februray ROTHENBERG, Jerome and Pierre Joris (Ed.). Pablo Picasso. The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems. Cambridge: Exact Change, , p.