Weeping Woman, 1937

      For Picasso, creating a painting was primary; the fact that it was a portrait of a woman was secondary.  He manipulated form, line and colour.  He treated the face or body as if it were a construction, a still life whose diverse elements - nose, ears, neck - he could arrange as seemed best to him, reassembling these distortions towards an expressive end.

Weeping Woman, 1937

       When a strong emotion is felt, it is often revealed in terms of physical transformation, reflected in phrases like: ’her eyes jumped out of her head’, a ‘screwed up mouth’, a face ‘streaming with tears’.  These emotions Picasso expressed in his paintings, and during the war his portraits of Dora Maar would symbolize the general human grief.

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