The Weeping Woman

A woman dissolves in grief, her face fractured into jagged planes, her tears falling like shards of glass as she presses a handkerchief to her mouth, her teeth and clenched fingers wrenched by anguish. Picasso developed the Weeping Woman from the screaming mother of his Guernica, also in this collection, and modeled her on his lover, the photographer Dora Maar. Now in the Tate, it distills the mural's collective horror into a single unbearable face - grief itself shattered into harsh color and broken form, the personal echo of a national catastrophe.