Girl Before A Mirror

Girl Before a Mirror shows Picasso's young mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, one of his favorite subjects in the early 1930s. Her white-haloed profile, rendered in a smooth lavender pink, appears serene. But it merges with a more roughly painted, frontal view of her face—a crescent, like the moon, yet intensely yellow, like the sun, and "made up" with a gilding of rouge, lipstick, and green eye-shadow. Perhaps the painting suggests both Walter's day-self and her night-self, both her tranquillity and her vitality, but also the transition from an innocent girl to a worldly woman aware of her own sexuality.
It is also a complex variant on the traditional Vanity—the image of a woman confronting her mortality in a mirror, which reflects her as a death's head. On the right, the mirror reflection suggests a supernatural x-ray of the girl's soul, her future, her fate. Her face is darkened, her eyes are round and hollow, and her intensely feminine body is twisted and contorted. She seems older and more anxious. The girl reaches out to the reflection, as if trying to unite her different
From the late 1920s, his work became more marked by a new and mounting emotional tenseness, a mood of foreboding mixed with anguish and despair. Girl Before a Mirror is from this latter period. He proceeds in the work from his intense feeling for the model and paints her in a rousing and mysterious fashion. She would remain in Picasso's life for another four years before she was replaced by Dora Maar, and here the artist transforms her into a quasi-mythical being (in keeping with Picasso's interest in mythical references, such as his paintings in the late 1920s of the minotaur): Picasso has a remarkable ability to empathically displace the egos of his models, male or female. This young girl's act of self-contemplation may well have been