Woman Ironing

A thin, weary woman bears down on her iron, her bony shoulders hunched, her head sunk, the whole gaunt figure rendered in chill blues and greys. Picasso gives the laundress the angular elongation and pathos of his Blue Period, finding monumental dignity in exhausting, ill-paid labor. Now in the Guggenheim, Woman Ironing is among the most affecting of those works - the pressing weight of the iron and of poverty made visible in the slope of her body, an image of toil and depletion that lifts a humble worker into a figure of quiet tragedy.