Weeping Woman with Handkerchief by Pablo Picasso

Weeping Woman with Handkerchief by Pablo Picasso is a depiction of despair and pain. The woman represents the painful realities in the world.Weeping Woman with Handkerchief is an oil painting on canvass done by Pablo Picasso, a Spanish artist. The painting is part of Guernica, which is a collection of antiwar masterpieces of 1937. In the Weeping Woman with Handkerchief, tears fell from the woman’s face which was reported to be inspired by artist-photographer, Dora Maar. Picasso’s captured in this painting his feelings toward the events in Spain.

The Weeping Woman with Handkerchief

The Weeping Woman with Handkerchief shows a woman who is in deep sorrow. One hand is at her heart while tears come streaming down her face. Her head is covered with traditional Spanish head covering called mantilla. This represents the ideals of Spanish womanhood.

One can see a line down the center of her face which is a technique developed by Picasso to show different angles or perspectives of an object or person. It is intended to depict the frontal side and the profile of the person at the same time.

The artist Pablo Picasso used oil on canvass on this painting. Picasso used watercolours prepared by hand on larger surfaces. Pablo Picasso's Weeping Woman with Handkerchief (1937) used a new way of depicting perceptions which is abstract painting based on African Art.

It shows the essence of a subject rather than its realistic portrayal. Andre Breton said that Picasso used Surrealism. During his time, the art was influenced by changes in science and society which showed less on tradition and a different view of the uncertainties of surface structure, and these were the underlying concepts on the idea of Modernism.

Picasso was among the pioneers of the style known as cubism. Through cubism, Picasso “examined” the primary geometry of things and the idea of seeing the same object from a number of different perspectives at the same time.

Symbolism of the Weeping Woman

His portrayal of people, like the weeping woman with handkerchief showed a distorted physical reality through exaggeration of shapes or setting things in the “wrong” place. Picasso did not want a realistic depiction of the world but in expressing deeper emotions of human experience through his art.

In the Weeping Woman with Handkerchief, Picasso created a huge collection of antiwar canvas Guernica in 1937 to protest the lives lost in the Spanish Civil War. The name Guernica is derived from the Basque city Guernica which was bombed by the Germans during the Spanish Civil War. After Picasso completed Guernica he continued to explore one of its motifs: the weeping woman. He was the subject of his paintings in the succeeding months.

The main theme of the Weeping Woman with Handkerchief is sorrow and pain. Tears which can be seen all over her face in the Weeping Woman with Handkerchief symbolizes despair. She represents both Picasso's public and private agony. Most of all, she is an emblem of the faces of life and the world around.

She was the victim of Spanish Civil War which Picasso strongly opposed, the grieving mother who lost her child in the war, the terrified peasant, the stunned survivor. She was also a depiction of Picasso’s lover at that time, the artist-photographer Dora Maar.

This is one of Picasso’s unforgettable masterpieces because of its raw portrayal of deep emotions. Its method of depiction is unique too being abstract; it is more concerned with showing the feelings or evoking emotions rather than the realistic depiction of the object or person.