Portrait of a Woman

About this work

1938 — a year after "Guernica", in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. Faces in Picasso’s paintings of these years are seen frontally and in profile at once: one eye face-on, one in profile, the nose split. The figure he returned to again and again that year is Dora Maar — a Surrealist photographer and his partner from 1936 to 1944, who photographed "Guernica" as it was being made. Of his portraits she later said: "They are all lies. They’re Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar."

Here, unusually for this exhibition, the material does not fight the source but agrees with it: Picasso broke the face into separate planes, and a mosaic is already separate planes.

Rami Alon went a step further and laid the stones in a different direction in every plane. Each facet of the face and the dress has its own grain, and the shift of direction is what divides them — not colour alone. Painting cannot do that.