The Weeping Woman - portrait

Painted in 1937, this is one of Pablo Picasso's most famous images of grief. The woman crying here was inspired by Dora Maar, a photographer and artist who was Picasso's partner and muse during this period. Her face is twisted and broken into sharp angles, with a white handkerchief pressed to her mouth that almost looks like shattered glass. This fractured, multi-angled style is classic Cubism, the movement Picasso helped invent, where objects and faces are broken apart and shown from several viewpoints at once.

The weeping woman was not just a private portrait. She grew out of Picasso's monumental work Guernica, his furious response to the bombing of a Spanish town during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso returned to the crying woman again and again in paintings and drawings, treating her as a symbol of the suffering caused by that conflict. The bright, almost cheerful colors here make a strange contrast with the pain on her face, and that clash is exactly the point. Picasso once said that for him, Dora was always a weeping woman, and you can feel how deeply that idea moved him.