Painted on 30 October 1932, Woman Sitting Near a Window is one of the final great portraits that crown the euphoric series of masterpieces from this seminal year. By this time, Marie-Thérèse had risen to ascendance in every area of her lover’s output. Here, in one of the most impressive and stately portraits Picasso ever painted of her, she has claimed absolute dominion, an idolized muse reigning deity-like over the artist and his creation.
On a monumental scale, Marie-Thérèse fills the expanse of the large canvas and is pushed up to the very edge of the picture plane. As a result, she not only presides over the light-filled room of the composition, but her command breaks through into the viewer’s own space, rendering us mere mortals in her presence as we gaze up before her. No longer made of flesh and blood, Picasso has presented her as a winged goddess, a modern-day Nike, aglow with light and life. Framed by a panel of sky blue, her head is lunar, luminous, and sculptural as if carved from marble, while her body is sensuous and soft, a composite of curving planes orbiting around her fiery red torso.
The youthfulness and statuesque beauty of Marie-Thérèse inspired a new pictorial vocabulary in Picasso’s work, her presence arousing in the artist a desire to convey her plentiful body in both two and three-dimensional forms. Immediately reminiscent of the plaster busts of 1931, her instantly recognizable profile has a strongly sculptural quality, its outline rendered with a single incised line, as if her lover’s finger has traced the course of her profile. It was this visual iconography that would serve as the definitive artistic shorthand for his portrayals of Marie-Thérèse throughout the 1930s.
Comments