The Face That Would Not Stop Crying
After Guernica burned in newsprint photographs, Picasso could not paint the horror out of his hands — so for months he painted one weeping face, over and over, until it became a woman he loved.
On 26 April 1937, German bombers acting on Franco's behalf destroyed the Basque town of Guernica. Picasso, already at work on a mural commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition, saw newspaper photographs of the massacre and was shaken to his core. 'In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica,' he told the Springfield Republican that July, 'I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.'
His protest had begun months earlier, in January 1937, with two etchings titled The Dream and Lie of Franco, accompanied by a prose poem written on 8 and 9 January 1937 and thick with images of weeping — cries of children, cries of women, cries of birds, cries of flowers, cries of timbers and of stones, cries of bricks, cries of furniture, of beds and chairs, of curtains, of pots, of cats and of papers. It was the first sign of an obsession taking root: the weeping woman as a symbol of Spain's suffering under Franco.
While composing Guernica, Picasso made his first studies of a weeping woman on 24 May 1937. He inserted her image into the lower right corner of the canvas, then removed it — he decided her grief would upstage the agonized expressions of the four women already in the painting. Guernica needed to capture the shock of destruction, not the mourning that follows it.
But the weeping woman would not leave him. Between 8 June and 6 July 1937, he produced a dozen drawings and four oil paintings of her. He carried the theme through a summer holiday in Mougins and returned to complete the most elaborate version, now in the Tate collection, on 26 October 1937. By the end of that October, he had made 36 works on the same haunted face. Art historian Judi Freeman later wrote, 'Her visage haunted him. He drew her frequently, almost obsessively... She was the metaphor for his private agonies.'
The face belonged to Dora Maar, Picasso's mistress and muse. They had met in the winter of 1935, introduced by the poet Paul Éluard while Maar worked as a photographer on Jean Renoir's film Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. Picasso was 26 years older, but the two were bound by a shared devotion to art and politics. Maar, a Surrealist photographer in her own right, arranged the studio at 7 rue des Grands Augustins where Guernica was created, and it was she who photographed its progress, documenting the mural's evolution step by step.
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