The Weeping Woman

Picasso created The Weeping Woman during the Spanish Civil War,which broke out in July 1936,when General Franco revolted against the Republican government.It was part of a series of works in response to the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War on 26 April 1937.The bombing took place when Adolf Hitler ordered the German airforce to bomb the Basque town on behalf of Franco.The painting was a personal protest after seeing newspaper photographs of the event.

In January 1937,Picasso had been asked to produce a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition. While he was working on the commission,the bombing of Guernica occurred. Picasso was so shocked by the massacre that he stated in the Springfield Republican on 18 July 1937,“In the panel on which I am working,which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art,I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death”.The Weeping Woman series has been described as a postscript to Guernica.

Picasso’s protest against the Franco regime began with his creation of two etchings in January 1937,titled The Dream and Lie of Franco. The work was accompanied by a prose poem,written by Picasso on 8 and 9 January 1937,which features imagery of women weeping and was a precursor to his visual representation of the weeping woman as a symbol for the suffering of Spain under Franco.

…cries of children cries of women cries of birds cries of flowers cries of timbers and of stones cries of bricks cries of furniture of beds and chairs of curtains of pots of cats and of papers cries of odors which claw at one another cries of smoke pricking the shoulder of the cries which strew in the cauldron and of the rain of birds which inundates the sea which gnaws the bone and breaks its teeth biting the cotton wool which the sun mops up from the plate which the purse and the pocket hide in the print which the foot leaves in the rock.

During the creation of Guernica,Picasso made his first studies of a weeping woman on 24 May 1937, however,it was not to be included in the composition of Guernica. An image of the weeping woman was inserted in the lower right of the painting,but this was removed by Picasso,who considered that it would upstage the agonised expressions of the four women in the painting.Picasso’s aim in producing Guernica was to portray the immediate shock and horror of the destruction,rather than the tears of mourning that would arise in the aftermath.

Following the completion of Guernica,Picasso continued with his obsession for the weeping woman.Judi Freeman remarked that,“The one motif he could not relinquish was that of the weeping woman. Her visage haunted him. He drew her frequently, almost obsessively, for the next several months. She was the metaphor for his private agonies”. Between 8 June and 6 July 1937,Picasso produced a dozen drawings and four oil paintings depicting the weeping woman. After returning from a summer holiday in Mougins, he completed The Weeping Woman on 26 October 1937.In total,36 works depicting the weeping woman have been identified, executed between May and the end of October 1937.

The Weeping Woman (Pablo Picasso)
Oil on canvas
61cm × 50cm
26 October 1937
London: Tate Modern