The ''Woman in Hat and Fur Collar (Marie-Thérèse Walter)'' is a painting by

Pablo Picasso Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...

executed in 1937 and exhibited at the

National Art Museum of Catalonia The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (, English: "National Art Museum of Catalonia"), abbreviated as MNAC, is a museum of Catalan visual art located in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Situated on Montjuïc hill at the end of Avinguda de la Reina Ma ...

(Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya) in

Barcelona Barcelona ( , , ) is a city on the coast of northeastern Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within ci ...

Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = ''Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , i ...

History

It was painted in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

in 1937, and is one of the numerous portraits Picasso did of

Marie-Thérèse Walter Marie-Thérèse Walter (13 July 1909 – 20 October 1977) was a French model and lover of Pablo Picasso from 1927 to about 1935 and the mother of their daughter Maya Widmaier-Picasso. Their relationship began when she was seventeen years old; he ...

, his lover between 1927 and 1935, approximately, and the mother of his daughter Maya. In these portraits, Picasso carries out an exhaustive analytic exercise in which the youth and personality of Marie-Thérèse are subjected to a thousand metamorphic transfigurations. The artist merges the frontal view of the face and the profile into a single image and turns the model into an icon of sensuality by means of a rich pictorial language in which the distorted forms marked the consolidation of the so-called 'Picasso style'. The portrait is at the same time epilogue to the confrontation between the two essential models of the moment, Marie-Thérèse and

Dora Maar Henriette Theodora Markovitch (22 November 1907 – 16 July 1997), known as Dora Maar, was a French photographer, painter, and poet. A romantic partner of Pablo Picasso, Maar was depicted in a number of Picasso's paintings, including his ''Portr ...

. Despite the distorted forms, the diverging eyes and the angular features, this portrait is easily identifiable because, like the ones he did at the same time of Nusch,

Paul Éluard Paul Éluard (), born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel (; 14 December 1895 – 18 November 1952), was a French poet and one of the founders of the Surrealist movement. In 1916, he chose the name Paul Éluard, a matronymic borrowed from his maternal ...

's second wife, and of Dora Maar, it preserves the sitter's essential features. The clear connection of Picasso's works and his love life is taken for granted today, and when his art of the early 1930s is discussed, the growing phrased used is "the Marie-Therese period." Picasso's affair with Marie-Therese was a secret, and she would gradually usurp the throne then occupied by

Olga Khokhlova Olga Picasso (born Olga Stepanovna Khokhlova; russian: Ольга Степановна Хохлова; 17 June 1891 – 11 February 1955) was a ballet dancer in the Russian ballet. She was also the first wife of Pablo Picasso, one of his ea ...

, the artist's legal wife. Marie-Therese will be subject to constant transformations. Some range from portraits that are instantly recognizable to transcendent universal symbols. Fantastic reinventions of the human body were always at the core of Picasso's genius. In Woman in Hat and Fur Collar, the artist shows her facial profile and frontal view in the same painting. She is looking to viewers both left and right. In his work, woman is the vehicle for the expression of intense emotion, but the feelings expressed are those of humanity at large: far from being the other, she is the self.

Collection history

When the MNAC opened in 2004, there were some gaps in content especially with respect to modern artists. One of the most absent was Picasso. The work entered the museum in 2007, one of a set of 8 pieces that are part of a group and fills many gaps in the artist's career. Details of the work: Oil on canvas Painted in Paris, on December 4, 1937. The painting is not signed but dated as "4D37" in the upper right corner. It is a deposit of State since 2007, the company Albertis Foundation joined the museum MNAC reference number 214090.

Exhibits

In addition to being in the museum's collection, the picture was shown in the following exhibitions: *''Picasso. De la caricatura a les metamorfosis d'estil'' (From caricature to metamorphosis), Barcelona, Museu Picasso 2003.''Picasso'', MNAC, 2007

History

Collection history

Exhibits

See also

References

Further reading