Picasso's Weeping Woman with Handkerchief

Pablo Picasso's Weeping Woman with Handkerchief (1937) comes from one of his most productive periods, an era in which he was producing works demonstrating a new emotional tension, a brooding sense of foreboding, and a preoccupation with anguish and despair. His works display a concern with the mythological image of the Minotaur and the images of the dying horse and the weeping woman (Osborne 434). Picasso's works were involved with a new way of depicting perceptions, seeking the essence of a subject rather than a strict recreation of reality. Andre Breton stated that Picasso was an heir to Surrealism (Osborne 424). The art of the time was also much influenced by changes in science and society reflecting less reliance on tradition and a different view of the uncertainties of surface structure, and these conceptions were embodied in the idea of Modernism.

Modernism is a term applied retroactively to certain literary and artistic trends at the beginning of the twentieth century. The term postmodernism has been applied to culture after 1960, but the terminology is somewhat ambiguous. It might imply simply what comes after modernism, or it might imply a sense of continuation of modernism in a modified form (Baldick 174-175). 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 re

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was an act of pure terrorism, as the town had no military importance (MacDonald 64). Picasso supported the Republican cause and was asked to paint a wall-sized mural form the Spanish Pavilion at the World Exposition in Paris. Because of Guernica, he picked total warfare as his theme (MacDonald 63-64). In order to make certain the painting evoked a strong and personal emotion, Picasso sought to minimize his own involvement in its meaning and to leave it to the viewer to decide for him or herself. One of his techniques to achieve this was to minimize the use of color (Lyttle 135). Guernica would lead to the Weeping Woman with Handkerchief in that it was a work in which Picasso developed new ideas and images, one of which was the weeping-woman image (Lyttle 137). this image is derived from Spanish art, dominated by the faces of Mater Dolorosa (Our Lady of Sorrows), etched with tears. In preparatory sketches for Guernica, Picasso increasingly used color crayons in producing a series of female hears. They originated in the overall work with the screaming mother, but the heads over a period of four months became progressively less related to Guernica. These "weeping women" over time evolved into quasi-surrealist detached heads

Category: Arts - P