Picasso Girl Before a Mirror

"Girl before a Mirror" (1932), one of several standouts in MoMA's vast collection of Pablo Picasso's work, takes the traditional artistic theme of a woman before her mirror and reinvents it in radically modern terms. The girl's profile and blonde hair identify her as Marie-Therese Walter, the artist's lover, muse and a profoundly transformative presence in both his life and art, but the painting is far from a conventional portrait. Its dazzling jewel-like colors, boldly contoured shapes and surface patterning transform the girl and her shadowy reflection into a deeply mysterious image that is both captivating and strange. In her essay, MoMA's Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Anne Umland, explores this work in depth and describes the circumstances of its creation: the artist's private life, his practice as a sculptor, his rivalry with other artists both living and dead and his concern, at the age of 51, about his contemporary relevance and artistic legacy.