Descripción
Neither this poster nor its subject have been reproduced in other posters. The subject is a seated woman with a hat, her face, constructed in Cubist planes, shown frontally with an intense gaze and a mouth in profile. Half of the face, heavily shaded, merges with the hair. Picasso achieves a chromatic balance with the yellow of the hat, the pale background of the face and the dark bust that is turned away from the profile of the face.
This work is part of a group of five similar works that the Master painted shortly before the end of the Nazi occupation of Paris, which ended on August 25, 1944.
Barr says that during the days of terror in the streets of Paris, Picasso was working on a series of realist portraits and on a version of Poussin’s Bachanal. At the same time, “the tanks went into action. Heavy fighting had broken out on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. The windows of Picasso’s studio were shaking. “Somehow I had to break the tension, fill the waiting period with activity and do something so different that it had no connection with the surrounding frenzy.”
