PABLO PICASSO - Málaga, 1881 – Mougins, 1973
This is one of several portraits that Picasso made of Marie-Thérèse Walter, his sentimental companion between 1927 and 1935, in which he carries out an exhaustive analytical exercise in which the youth and personality of the sitter are subjected to a thousand transfigurations. The artist fuses in a single image the frontal vision of the face with that of the profile and turns the model into an icon of sensuality through a rich pictorial language in which the distortion of forms represents the consolidation of what specialists have called the “Picasso style”. This work constitutes at the same time the epilogue of the confrontation between the two essential models of that moment: Marie-Thérèse herself and Dora Maar.