Pablo Picasso: Girl before a Mirror (One on One)

Girl before a Mirror (1932), one of several standouts in MoMAs vast collection of Pablo Picassos work, takes the traditional artistic theme of a woman before her mirror and reinvents it in radically modern terms. The girls profile and blonde hair identify her as Marie-Thrse Walter, the artists 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, MoMAs Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Anne Umland, explores this work in depth and describes the circumstances of its creation: the artists 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.