The Weeping Woman

Pablo Picasso painted this shattered, sobbing face in 1937, and it has stayed burned into people's minds ever since. The woman's features break apart into jagged shards, her hands pressed to her cheeks as tears stream down. Picasso filled the picture with bright yellows, greens, and reds, colors you might expect in something cheerful, but here they only make her pain feel louder. Her twisted mouth and spilling eyes turn Cubism into a tool for raw feeling rather than clever visual games.

The painting came out of a season of horror. Earlier that same year Picasso made "Guernica," his enormous protest against the bombing of a Spanish town during the Spanish Civil War, and the weeping woman became a figure he kept coming back to as a stand-in for grief and the wreckage of war. His model was usually Dora Maar, a photographer and artist who was his partner then and who photographed him at work on "Guernica." She had a sharp verdict on his portraits of her, saying they were all lies and none of them truly resembled her.

The whole point was to show sorrow from every direction at once, as if no single glimpse could ever hold that much heartbreak. This is not an easy picture to sit with, and Picasso never wanted it to be.