Aeroplanes and Bees - Theatre Picasso (I)

‘Poison grows in this dark.
It is in the water of tears
Its black blooms rise.’ 

(Wallace Stevens, ‘Another Weeping Woman’ ) 

 

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Even with a painting that I love, and one that I think I know well, I have not been paying attention. Picasso’s The Weeping Woman, set back at a gloomy turn in a passage, blazed out of the darkness. As is often the case, conversations from other gallery goers, startle you into recognition. “Look at the bee on her ear … and the aeroplanes in her eyes!”

 

Picasso, The Weeping Woman (1937)

I waited till this couple had moved on, and closed in, discerning in the eyes of Dora Maar - the model for The Weeping Woman - the black and ominous silhouettes of jet planes. The obvious had escaped me: the portrait was a reaction to the Spanish Civil War and the bombing of the town of Guernica, almost serving as a pendant to the artist’s most famous painting, one that unforgettably captures the atrocities committed by Franco’s nationalist forces, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

 

Detail from The Weeping Woman

And that bee. Is it a bee? Or as someone else has suggested, a hummingbird? I did my research, and the consensus alights on a bee. Certainly an insect of some kind, lapping away at the long streak of a nectar tear.

 

Detail from The Weeping Woman

These newly noted details complemented the things that I already loved about the painting. The angular shapes and planes and a return to Cubism, but this time employing the kind of vibrant colours that would be more usually seen in a Matisse. I gravitate back and forth between which of these two artists I prefer, Picasso or Matisse? I should just settle with adoring them both. It’s the handkerchief that had waylaid me the most, and how it merged with fat fingers and tears. And getting close to the woman’s hair, laid down like tubes of virgin plasticine, freshly taken out of the packet at primary school. And then that cleft in the chin rhyming with the cleft, like a whale’s fluke, between the eyes. It is both beautiful and terrifying.  

Indeed, initial grumbles about the Theatre Picasso exhibition that has just opened at Tate Modern, have quickly given way to the realisation, that even though I’d seen these paintings multiple times - with a few exceptions, everything here is already in that Tate’s collection - this is a wonderfully curated and engaging show. I will return to it over and over again between now and spring.