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The mirror and the girl's head are at the same level, and both are split up into black and white areas. A series of horizontal lines emphasize the line of vision. The central figure has its arm fully extended and its head thrown back, a posture that is perhaps intended to express effusive admiration or a flattering attitude towards the young beauty. The figure in mid-position is so unimportant that it cannot even be said whether a man or a woman is presented here. The central motif is the oval-shaped mirror, and that is why it is positioned in the visual center of the drawing The young woman on the right, now past the prime of her youth, and who makes a conspicuous pose when she strides into the scene, is of greater significance. Both her body and her head with its distinctive profile are bursting with energy, and suggest a certain aggressiveness. The dynamic force set up by the numerous diagonals has a surprise effect. The chin is even boldly underlined, the nose is exaggeratedly pointed. The woman's hair style is quite unusual, bearing a resemblance to a pair of horns. However, it is not clear what is to her immediate left and right. Is she holding something in her outstretched hand (a black scarf?) and something else behind her back? Possibly, the artist merely had objects in the background in mind. Some of the shapes around the figure do actually suggest a bed, perhaps a four-poster, for in the top corner of the picture the drapes of a curtain are just discernible. The latter descends from the top edge of the picture in a sweeping curve, thus emphasizing the woman's head in a really peculiar fashion and, at the same time, forming a conspicuous white line which appears to virtually grow out of her forehead. The heavy, black semicircle above her head has its counterpart in the light-colored, sun-like spiral above the head of the younger woman. This striking phenomenon is undoubtedly a key to a proper understanding of the drawing.
It is possible to construe this drawing simply as a genre scene. The frolicsome young woman basks in her beauty, her vanity being additionally emphasized by the figure in mid-position, while the older woman observes the scene with a feeling of jealousy or suspicion. The mass of black color around her figure and her aggressive features build up an extremely tense contrast to the left-hand area of the drawing, making the observer sense that the playful scenario on the left is threatened by disaster looming from the right.
But the drawing can also be construed as an allegory transcending the elements that simply model the real scene, and in which the characters take on a meaning in the realm of ideas. The dramatic presentation of the figure approaching from the right makes the assumption that this figure is a supernatural being quite a feasible one. If the right-hand figure is viewed, for example, as a kind of angel of death or as death itself (French: 'la mort'), what is illustrated here is then the old vanitas theme. Whilst, on the left, beauty is still admiring her reflection in the mirror, decay or death is already waiting in the wings, or even suddenly befalls the young woman. The black semicircle above the mysterious figure on the right can also be interpreted as an iconographical feature, as a 'black sun' (French: 'soleil noir'), in other words as a symbol for destruction. The 'black sun' topos - that of the 'black mirror' and the 'black light' too - was often used by a close friend of Picasso's, the poet Paul Eluard. In 'Guernica' too, Picasso's monumental mural which was created three years later, there is a juxtaposition of light that radiates and light that emits darkness.
The figure on the right is an extremely unusual one - even in such a diverse oeuvre as that of Picasso. It is highly probable that its precursors are to be found in the late works of Johann Heinrich Fussli (1741-1825). Since 1932, ever since his visit to the Kunsthaus in Zurich on the occasion of his retrospective exhibition there, Picasso had often borrowed motifs and formal elements from Fussli's works. The woman on the right in the drawing under discussion is sharply reminiscent of the figures of dramatic and emotional women that appear in Fussli's works, the features that call these to mind being the woman's clear-cut and distinctive profile, her peculiar hairstyle, and the curve of the curtain 'joined', as it were, to her head. Both the jealousy theme and that of 'a young woman threatened by an older one' are frequently to be encountered in Fussli's works, and these topics were, indeed, also of particular concern to Picasso in 1934. At the time, Picasso's wife, Olga, was frantically jealous of his mistress, Marie-Therese Walter, for whom he had even furnished a flat nearly opposite his own.
In 1950, Picasso took up the 'woman with mirror' motif once again. This time, a young woman with a somewhat skeptical facial expression holds out to an older woman a mirror in which the latter contemplates herself rather wistfully. The entire area of the picture is strewn with sharp, prickly shapes suggestive of negative, painful sensations. On the left, a vase of flowers is visible in the background. There is no doubt that, far from being a mere fill-in, this motif actually has an important symbolic function. Flowers in a vase are beautiful, but they soon wilt. Once again, here we have the vanitas motif, linked to the short lifespan of feminine beauty. But, in addition, this vase also calls to mind the rather indefinite pictorial element to the left of the woman on the right in the drawing of 1934. Perhaps it is a vase of flowers that is meant here, too.
Only a few weeks before the creation of the newly-discovered drawing of 12.5.1934, Picasso had already made a drawing in which the motif of a woman with an oval-shaped mirror crops up. The woman sprawls around in front of a large mirror standing on the floor, directly adjacent to which there is again a vase of flowers. In the case of this drawing too, it would be difficult to deny that there is a symbolic relationship between the flowers and the woman. Many of Picasso's pictures are full of symbolism, and it is not at all unusual for small subordinate scenes to have an inner connection with the main theme.
The newly-discovered drawing of 12.5.1934 corresponds completely to Picasso's style and intellectual stance at that period, and even epitomizes the link, only recently established and about which a report appeared in a Swiss art journal in 1992, to Fussli's works. These motifs and compositional elements borrowed from Fussli are themselves sufficient reason for me to rule out the possibility of the drawing being a fake. Moreover, if that were the case, it would have had to be executed by an artist of the same caliber as Picasso. And there is no such artist.
The unusual action of an artist in concealing his signature and only leaving a fingerprint to posterity can be explained by Picasso's private situation at the time. Perhaps the drawing was a gift to a mistress, and Picasso preferred not to leave behind any evidence that might have come to the notice of his extremely jealous wife. At all events, the content of this drawing has a great deal to do with that eternal topic: 'woman'."
© Eberhard Fisch 1993.
(Translation by James Hotchkiss)
Eberhard Fisch is the author of numerous German and Swiss articles about Picasso, and the book, 'Guernica by Picasso', a Study of the Picture and Its Context, 1988, Associated University Presses, Inc.
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