Mixed Media on glass

Signed on the back.

You may think this Artwork looks strange—but it shows a real woman named Marie-Thérèse. She had a round face and straight hair, and she liked to sit quietly, reading. Pablo Picasso, who painted this picture, was very much in love with her.
Among Picasso’s most celebrated likenesses of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, Woman with a Book balances sensuality and restraint, enclosing exuberant, thickly applied colour in a network of sinuous black lines. The composition pays homage to the Neoclassical master of line, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whose work Picasso had admired since his youth, and whose Portrait of Madame Moitessier the Spanish painter had first encountered in 1921. Resting his model’s head on her hand, and replacing Madame Moitessier’s fan with the fluttering pages of a book, Picasso tapped into the eroticism latent beneath Ingres’s image of bourgeois respectability. The serene profile reflected in a mirror at right in Picasso’s portrait likewise references its Neoclassical precedent but may also constitute an abstract self-portrait.

Fade, Tear, Scratch, and Warp Resistant.
Mounted on 16 mm MDF.