Title: Woman Ironing
Description: Woman Ironing (1904) is an oil painting by Pablo Picasso completed during the artist's Blue Period (1901—1904). This evocative image, painted in neutral tones of blue and gray, depicts an emaciated woman with hollowed eyes, sunken cheeks, and bent form, as she presses down on an iron with all her will. A recurrent subject matter for Picasso during this time is the desolation of social outsiders. This painting, as the rest of his works of the Blue Period, is inspired by his life in Spain but was painted in Paris. When Picasso painted Woman Ironing he was roughly 22 years old. Living in Paris, with little money, he would often start a painting on a canvas, abandon it, and later use the same surface to paint over a new work. Since 1989, when an infrared camera was used to examine Woman Ironing, art historians and conservators have been aware of the existence of another portrait beneath it. The work is part of the Thannhauser Collection currently on display in the Thannhauser Gallery of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Author(s): Pablo Picasso