Pablo Picasso's Girl Before A Mirror

Pablo Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror [Figure 1] was painted in March 1932. During that time, Picasso had been considered one of the fathers of cubism, which was defined by The Metropolitan Museum of Art as “…one of the most influential visual art styles of the early twentieth century”. The girl in the painting was his youngest mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter. Marie was 17 years old at the time this was painted and appears to be pregnant. I picked Picasso’s painting because after all the works I had looked up, this was the one that I could not stop looking at. The longer I looked the more I started to realize, this painting had a deeper meaning than I had originally analyzed. Picasso painted Marie in the way he viewed her, one half of her face made up to look the way she did during the day and in public. The other half a bare but still beautiful face, probably the way he’d see her during their more intimate times. Picasso’s use of the formal elements as well as composition depicts an image of a young girl battling with her personal image. In the words of Pablo Picasso, “Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.”, this proves to be true in the colors used for Marie and her reflection. Marie is painted with warm, pastel …show more content…
Now, more than ever, girls are faced with their worst critic in the mirror every day. The media has glorified impossible body standards for women for years and it is clear that this may have been an issue 17-year-old Marie dealt with all those years ago. To quote Picasso one last time, “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth”, what Marie was seeing in her reflection was not what she truly looked like. By painting Marie as herself and as her own reflection, Picasso revealed the truth of her lack of self-confidence and viewers can relate to this internal

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