Now most people do not immediately think of Picasso when they think of beautiful women. I mean, how beautiful can a woman be when they have two eyes on one side of their nose? But this is an occassion where we can make an exception. Here we have a woman, I think she's nude, standing before a full length mirror. A lot of people don't get abstract art because it is abstract. But lwt me say this...what better way to describe an abstract meaning than an abstract work of art? And here is a case where I think it works very well. Most of the emotion and meaning of the painting is therefore conveyed in terms that we are not used to seeing. For example, we usually can tell people's emotions by looking at their facial expressions, moods and gestures. In realistic paintings that's about all you can use, but here, color and form push the mood more than anything else. A simpler way of putting this is to say, when you see bright happy colors, maybe you should think bright happy thoughts. Chaotic shapes could mean chaotic feelings and vice versa. So with that ammunition in the can it's not so hard to take a pot shot at this piece. First take a look at the background all around her. It's bright and busy, like a wallpaper pattern. Her face looks bright as well. Picasso gives us both the profile and the frontal in a neat little convention that has been used for a thousands different times since, including the MAC/OS logo. But something happens as we cross over into the looking glass. What the heck is going on here!? Her face changes to cool dark colors, and the eyes get all twisted up and contorted. What's Picasso trying to say? Perspectives of ourselves often turn out to be a lot more twisted than we acutally appear, and mirrors are often symbols or our own self perceptions. So what does she see? Is this how she sees herself, is she on the way to an eating disorder? Or is she really dark and twisted inside and her beauty is only a facade? I think it could go either way on a lot of these ideas. This is probably an example where the viewer is free to choose for themselves.
On a side note. There are a lot of great artists that I really like and admire...and then there are people who are such scumbags I would never ever associate with them. Picasso happens to be both. We actually know the identity of the girl in this picture, She was one of Picasso's mistresses named Marie Therese, a fourteen year old girl when Pablo met her. He was nearly 30 years her senior when they met. Acutally, Marie-Therese was the mistress he was cheating with while cheating on his other mistress Francoise while cheating on his long term mistress Dora while cheating on his wife Olga. There's a new movie out called "Surviving Picasso" care to guess why? While I glad to put Marie -Therese into the list of TTMBWIAHOAT, I just wish I didn't have to put Pablo's name up there too.
Oh, one last thing...In his old age Pablo eventually got divorced and married a woman much younger than him, who cheated on him constantly, never got caught, and inheirited his fortune when he died. You go girl!