MIT Libraries homeMIT Libraries logoDome

MIT
View Item 
  • Dome Home
  • Visual Collections
  • Architecture, Urban Planning, and Visual Arts
  • View Item
  • Dome Home
  • Visual Collections
  • Architecture, Urban Planning, and Visual Arts
  • View Item
JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

Girl before a Mirror

painter: Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973)
Thumbnail
Download104821_cp.jpg (1.359Mb)
Alternate file
104821_sv.jpg (5.944Mb)
104821_tm.jpg (23.69Kb)
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.3/22460
Date
1932
Description
Girl Before a Mirror shows Picasso's young mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, one of his favorite subjects in the early 1930s. Her white-haloed profile, rendered in a smooth lavender pink, appears serene. But it merges with a more roughly painted, frontal view of her face—a crescent, like the moon, yet intensely yellow, like the sun, and "made up" with a gilding of rouge, lipstick, and green eye-shadow. Perhaps the painting suggests both Walter's day-self and her night-self, both her tranquillity and her vitality, but also the transition from an innocent girl to a worldly woman aware of her own sexuality. It is also a complex variant on the traditional Vanity—the image of a woman confronting her mortality in a mirror, which reflects her as a death's head. On the right, the mirror reflection suggests a supernatural x-ray of the girl's soul, her future, her fate. Her face is darkened, her eyes are round and hollow, and her intensely feminine body is twisted and contorted. She seems older and more anxious. The girl reaches out to the reflection, as if trying to unite her different "selves." The diamond-patterned wallpaper recalls the costume of the Harlequin, the comic character from the commedia dell'arte with whom Picasso often identified himself—here a silent witness to the girl's psychic and physical transformations.
 
full view
 
Type of Work
Oil painting
Subject
Mirrors, Reflections, Wallpapers, Cubism, Self-perception, Women in art, Mistresses, Painting, Spanish --20th century, Art, Modern --20th century
Rights
(c)Davis Art Images
Rights Statement
Licensed for educational and research use by the MIT community only
Item is Part of
130929
Metadata
Show full item record

Collections
  • Architecture, Urban Planning, and Visual Arts

Browse

All of DomeCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateCreatorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionBy Issue DateCreatorsTitlesSubjects

My Account

LoginRegister
MIT Libraries homeMIT Libraries logo

Find us on

Twitter Facebook Instagram YouTube RSS

MIT Libraries navigation

SearchHours & locationsBorrow & requestResearch supportAbout us
PrivacyPermissionsAccessibility
MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Content created by the MIT Libraries, CC BY-NC unless otherwise noted. Notify us about copyright concerns.