"Girl Before a Mirror" (Picasso)

Achieves metamorphosis of traditional Vanity image, in which a woman looking in the mirror sees herself as a death's head; here, figure with double head is reflected as somber-faced but voluptuous image.

The painting is from March 1932. It was produced in the style Picasso was using at the time and evoked an image of Vanity such as had been utilized in art in earlier eras, though Picasso shifts the emphasis and creates a very different view of the image. The work is considered in terms of the erotic in Picasso's art, and critics in different periods have offered their assessments of the work to show a wide range of reactions.

Picasso was part of a movement that would become known as Modernism, a name which included a number of different artistic styles and aesthetic responses. Modernism is a term applied retroactively to certain literary and artistic trends at the beginning of the twentieth century. The disjointed time sense, the flight from the conventions of realism, and the adoption of complex new forms and styles in the modernist period were undertaken to provide new meaning, to illuminate the world in a different way, and to show different relationships within the observed world. Modernism rejected traditions that existed in the nineteenth century and sought to stretch the boundaries, str

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nd especially the figure of the harlequin. He also produced his fist sculptures during these years. From 1910 to 1916 Picasso worked with Braque and others on the development of Cubism, a movement Picasso would continue to explore throughout his career. In Paris in the late twenties, Picasso continued to paint pictures in an obviously Cubist manner, and his works were shown in Surrealist exhibitions. From the late 1920s, his work became more marked by a new and mounting emotional tenseness, a mood of foreboding mixed with anguish and despair. Girl Before a Mirror is from this latter period. He proceeds in the work from his intense feeling for the model and paints her in a rousing and mysterious fashion. She would remain in Picasso's life for another four years before she was replaced by Dora Maar, and here the artist transforms her into a quasi-mythical being (in keeping with Picasso's interest in mythical references, such as his paintings in the late 1920s of the minotaur): Picasso has a remarkable ability to empathically displace the egos of his models, male or female. This young girl's act of self-contemplation may well have been banal. If so, the very commonplaceness of the experience contributed to the universali
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2173
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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