Woman in Hat and Fur Collar

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Woman in Hat and Fur Collar (Marie-Thérèse Walter) (1937), painted in Paris in 1937, is one of the numerous portraits Pablo Picasso did of Marie-Thérèse Walter, his lover between 1927 and 1935, approximately, and the mother of his daughter Maya. In these portraits, Picasso carries out an exhaustive analytic exercise in which the youth and personality of Marie-Thérèse are subjected to a thousand metamorphic transfigurations. The artist made the model an icon of sensuality by means of a rich pictorial language in which the distorted forms marked the consolidation of the so-called 'Picasso style'. The portrait is at the same time epilogue to the confrontation between the two essential models of the moment, Marie-Thérèse and Dora Maar. Despite the distorted forms, the diverging eyes and the angular features, this portrait is easily identifiable, because, like the ones he did at the same time of Nusch, Paul Éluard's second wife, and of Dora Maar, it preserves the sitter's essential features.

This painting is 61 x 50 cm and is housed in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona.

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