• 20th Century Spanish Painting

• Woman Seated in a Chair , 1941
• oil on canvas
• 51 in. x 38 in. (129.54 cm x 96.52 cm)

• Pablo Picasso  (1881 - 1973)
• Spanish

• Anonymous Gift, 1953.3

• On View

The wives and mistresses of Picasso were frequent subjects in his enormous output of paintings, prints, drawings and sculpture. The photographer and painter Dora Maar, with whom Picasso began a ten-year liaison about 1936, was the model for this composition painted in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Maar, in fact, became one of his most frequent models in the period just before and during World War II. The anxiety of the occupation permeated Paris and certainly affected Picasso and Maar, and is expressed through the distortion of space and form in this painting. The contorted expression of Maar conveys the rage and sorrow Picasso felt over the horror of war.

Acknowledged as one of the most innovative and influential artists of the 20th century, Picasso broke with the traditional means of rendering three-dimensional form with the evolution of Cubism about 1907. While this 1941 composition reflects the distortion of form and space of Picasso's Cubist period, its bright color and emotional charge clearly distinguishes this work from his earlier, more intellectual Cubist compositions.