What is the story behind Pablo Picassos painting The Weeping Woman?
Weeping women was a reoccurring theme in many of Picasso’s paintings. The most famous is the weeping portraits is of his lovers Dora Maar. (She recorded his work on the masterpiece Guernica.) Picasso said that Dora was always weeping and that is why he finally ended up leaving her. Others say the reason she was always weeping was because Picasso left her. Picasso once said that painting, rather than being an aesthetic operation, was a way of “seizing the power by giving from to our terrors as well as our desires.” Perhaps in 1937 when most of these weeping women portraits were painted, Picasso was giving form to his feelings about his personal situations and the current political climate. According to Freeman, through these depictions he was examining his emotional responses to Olga Koklova, his estranged first wife; Marie-Therese Walter, who was a young woman of 17 when Picasso approached her on the street, and later bore him a daughter; and Dora Maar, the photographer who was his com
