Picasso cut the Weeping Woman out of Guernica, then painted her obsessively
While painting Guernica, Picasso sketched a weeping woman and slipped her into a corner of the mural, then scraped her out, fearing she would upstage the other figures. She would not leave him. Between May and October 1937 he made 36 works on the theme, and the face he kept returning to belonged to Dora Maar.
The series grew out of the Spanish Civil War. In January 1937 the Republic asked Picasso for a mural for its pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition, and in the same month he etched The Dream and Lie of Franco, adding a prose poem full of crying women. When German aircraft bombed the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April at Hitler's order, on Franco's behalf, newspaper photographs gave the mural its subject. Guernica aimed at the instant shock of destruction; tears of mourning belonged to the aftermath, so they went into a separate body of work often called its postscript.
From 8 June to 6 July he produced a dozen drawings and four oil paintings of a crying woman. After a summer in Mougins he finished the last and most elaborate canvas on 26 October 1937, now in the Tate. It measures 61 by 50 cm and packs hands, teeth, a handkerchief and tears into a knot of angular planes. The eyes are drawn like overflowing saucers, and the nose, mouth and eyes are each seen from a different angle. Roland Penrose, a biographer who once owned it, found the jarring colours unsettling on a face so full of grief. A version dated 18 October hangs in the National Gallery of Victoria.
Maar, a Surrealist photographer introduced to Picasso by the poet Paul Éluard in the winter of 1935, found him the studio where Guernica was painted and photographed its progress. The biographer John Richardson argued that her tears came less from Franco than from the painter's manipulation of her, and the relationship included physical abuse. She disliked the portraits, saying none of them was really her.
Other readings abound. Marilyn McCully links the image to Spanish processional statues of the Virgin of Sorrows, while Jonathan Jones in The Guardian spotted hope in the flower on her hat and an ear turning into a bird that sips a tear.
Source: The Weeping Woman
