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SUBJECT AREA LEGEND    
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ON THIS PAGE: About the Artist |
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Vasily Kandinsky Pablo Picasso Camille Pissarro Jackson Pollock Auguste Renoir Edouard Vuillard |
Selections from the Permanent Collection
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973): Woman with Yellow Hair
“We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.”
— Pablo Picasso
About the artist
Pablo Picasso is considered the most influential artist of the 20th century, and his lifelong creative invention repeatedly changed the course of visual thinking. He was born in 1881 into a middle-class family in Malaga, Spain. His father was a painter, teacher, and museum curator, and a major influence in Picasso ’s formative years as an artist. [more]
About this work
Woman with Yellow Hair, 1931
Picasso met Marie-Thérèse Walter, the subject of this portrait, in 1927 when she was 17 years old. They began an intense love affair, but concealed it from the public for many years as she was a teenager and the artist was married. [more]
| View + Discuss | |
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
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| Art Explorations | |
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Create a “visual timeline” reflecting Picasso’s life and career and his contributions to the history of art. Working in teams, ask students to research a specific decade from his 80-year career, and find images that reflect achievements in the visual arts, sciences and technology, and also socio-political events. Collage all of the images, interesting quotes, and reproductions of Picasso’s work throughout the decades into a collaborative timeline for the classroom. |
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Find other images of Picasso’s portraits on the Guggenheim Museum Web site (www.guggenheim.org) or on the Internet and compare the different styles to Woman with Yellow Hair. Choose pairs of portraits and ask students to create interior monologues or dialogues between the two subjects. Have them incorporate body language and stage direction into their scripts to fully flesh out the two characters. |
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Discuss how color affects our perception of Picasso’s portraits—for example, look at Woman Ironing (1904) from Picasso’s Blue Period as compared with Saltimbanques (1905) from his Rose Period. Ask students to create a self-portrait or to take a digital photograph of themselves and scan or upload it on the computer. Using Photoshop, ask students to change the mood or feeling of their self-portrait by applying filters to the image and changing the color, or experiment with paint or layering colored acetate paper over the self-portrait. Discuss how this changes the mood or feeling of the work of art. Students may want to research other artists, such as Andy Warhol, who have experimented with portraits and color. |
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Ask one student to volunteer as a model. Have the other students create a quick gesture drawing of the volunteer’s profile. Encourage them not to pick up their pencil as they draw, capturing this profile in one continuous line. From the completed drawing students can then reduce this profile down to one quick line that best represents the student’s features. What is the simplest line you can create to describe the student’s profile that captures his or her essence? What would you focus on or exaggerate in your own profile? |
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After exploring Picasso’s Cubist paintings and collages, choose one ordinary object, such as a guitar, and draw it from all the angles that you can see (turn the guitar or prop it on a stand). Cut up your drawings and then collage the fragments together making a new composition of forms. Try this same project using a digital camera. |
Additional Resources Ashton, Dore, ed., Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views. New York: Mailer, Norman, Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man. New York:Warner Books, 1995. Nash, Stephen A., ed., Picasso and the War Years 1937–1945. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998. Richardson, John, A Life of Picasso: Volume I. New York: Random House, 1991. FILM/VIDEO New Ways of Seeing: Picasso, Braque, and the Cubist Revolution, 1989. New York: The Museum of Modern Art and Public Media Home Vision, 58 minutes, color. Videocassette. Portrait
of an Artist: Picasso, 1985. Chicago: Home Vision, 81 minutes, Surviving Picasso, 1996. Los Angeles: Warner
Bros. 126 minutes, color. WEB SITES http://www.tamu.edu/mocl/picasso http://www.npg.si.edu http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/picasso/info.htm http://www.guggenheim.org |
Vocabulary CUBISM A style of painting, developed between 1907 and 1914 as a collaboration between Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, in which objects are represented as cubes and other geometric shapes. MUSE Any of the nine sister goddesses in Greek and Roman mythology, presiding over branches of learning and the arts. A poet’s inspiring goddess, a poet’s genius. SURREALISM A 20th-century movement in art and literature that sought to express what is in the subconscious mind by depicting objects and events as seen in dreams. |
