Oowolf lamented my lack of "Professor of Humanities" posts lately so I thought I would offer up some of that good stuff. I regard this as a masterpiece of Picasso's so this presents some good ground to start with. The first impression of this painting is that it's jarring and unpleasant. That, of course is only natural, because it's true. Then, also of course, as one studies it, the balance of colors takes on a Newtonian logic which is actually quite pleasing. So what comes next? Themes. What is portrayed? A crying woman. Her eyes are falling out of their sockets. A weird teardrop falls from a tube out of her left eye. Sickly green teardrop shaped fingers seem to clutch a handkerchief which she is gnashing between her teeth. She has an odd bifurcated hat of complementary colors: orange and blue. Now this seems like a good painting to analyze today, Valentines Day. If you look at the central part of this picture, what you see is an incomplete heart with the weird tear tube pointing down to the bottom of the heart shape. The same heart shape is continued on the right a little bit but is then broken. These creepy green teardrop fingers creep up the right side and break the heart shape. The left side eye bowl is still cradling its eye, barely. The right side eye has tipped over and the eye is about to take a spill. This is a painting of Dora Maar, the jewish girlfriend of Picasso. What about the split weird hat of orange and blue? heh heh. I don't know. Maybe it was meant to represent the profound split between left and right. Europe sure got it's fill of that. Picasso was a lefty. I don't fault him for that, but in this painting all the sad flowing grief seems to be on the left while the more jarring stuff seems to be on the right. Picasso was a very political painter. He joined the Communist Party. But he was too subtle for those brutes.
