I must confess that I am not really a Picasso fan. I respect his artwork but I do not find it attractive. However, I don't mind this painting. It displays Picasso's characteristic geometric shapes, and bright, contrasting colors, yet the face of the figure is not too distorted. For this reason, I felt like I could relate to the painting. I look in the mirror everyday, we all do. The image in her mirror is not a reflection--the colors are different. They are darker. Or perhaps, the purple in her face represents something "richer", more colorful than white. Looking in the mirror can be like this--sometimes we see someone staring back at us that we don't want to be. Sometimes a glimpse in the mirror gives us confidence, we see the "color", the brilliance in ourselves that no one else sees. Perhaps she is reflecting about aging and mortality, on beauty that fades. I think it is possible that she is pregnant because of the shape of her stomach. Perhaps she is thinking about life and death, what it means to bring a child into the world, or her transition from innocence to womanhood. Notice that she is reaching out to the mirror, to her reflection--is she longing for the past or eager for the future?According to the MoMA's website this is a portrait of Picasso's young mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, one of his favorite subjects in the early 1930s.
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