Customer Reviews

Picasso & The Weeping Women

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Picasso once said that painting, rather than being an aesthetic operation, was a way of "seizing the power by giving from to our terrors as well as our desires." Perhaps in 1937 when most of these weeping women portraits were painted, Picasso was giving form to his feelings about his personal situations and the current political climate.

According to Freeman, through these depictions he was examining his emotional responses to Olga Koklova, his estranged first wife; Marie-Therese Walter, who was a young woman of 17 when Picasso approached her on the street, and later bore him a daughter; and Dora Maar, the photographer who was his companion in the years prior to and during the war.

On another level this collection makes a political statement - these weeping women represent the anguish of Europeans being propelled into war. It should also be noted that 1937 was the year Picasso painted "Guernica," his response to the Spanish Civil War.

Author Freeman was Associate curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where she organized the exhibit of Picasso's Weeping Women. She has contributed an exemplary text, while over 100 color illustrations bring the artist's work to compelling life.

Gail Cooke

Of all of Picasso's artistic periods (and collections), this one is my favorite. And anyone who has been stunned by the emotional depth and symbolism of perhaps Picasso's most famous painting, the scene depicting Franco's devastation of the city of Guernica, this book will show you how it evolved as kernels of ideas in the great artist's mind.

These plates are the very embodiments of the grief and anguish we see in the faces of the people and animals in Guernica: empty hollow eyes, expanded dart-like but fire breathing nostrils, tongues that resemble knives, contorted torsos, hair unfurling like the tentacles of an octopus, disemboweled animals, etc. These are themes and symbols of anguished worked out to artistic perfection over a period of almost two years in Piccaso's mind. Each generation of Picasso's weeping women, represents a new modality of his emotional state as he prepared for the grand finale of Guernica. It hardly mattered that Marie-Therese Walter and Dora Maar, his two favorite Mistresses, were used as the canvas or backdrop for his "practice session" on the road to Guernica.

In our house, long before buying this book, we have had separate framed prints of each of these tormented ladies of the day and night gracing our living room walls. What is important about them is made imminently clear in this book of plates and expert annotation by Judi Freeman. There are no more secrets about them and their anguish once Ms. Freeman has done her thing: Picasso was on a mission; that mission was to express in the most profound way possible up to the limits of his considerable artistic abilities, what he felt about the massacre and atrocities committed by Francisco Franco, at Guernica. There is nothing here but controlled anger verging on madness oozing from frame to frame and from one modality to another. It is just one more gift, among so many, that Picasso has allowed us to share.

Judi Freeman takes us by the hand in this step-by-step evolutionary journey through the development of an artistic idea that leads to the emotional explosion we have come to know as Guernica. At once, Guernica reminds us both of what the best and the worse of our humanity is. And the artistic world since was never the same.

As we used to say once the cards in poker were dealt: "Read'm and weep," but be immensely enriched by the experience. Ten stars

In exploring the relationship between Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso I have been absolutely delighted in the information in this text. As well, the works of art and other related details. Thankfully we have this art history text for future generations.

Ahhhh, I can't get enough of historical fact coupled with art! Bravo!