Woman Ironing (French: La repasseuse)[1] is a 1904 oil painting by Pablo Picasso that was completed during the artist's Blue Period (1901—1904).
This evocative image, painted in neutral tones of blue and gray, depicts an emaciated woman with hollowed eyes, sunken cheeks, and bent form, as she presses down on an iron with all her will.
Picasso's artistic training began as a youth in Spain where traditions of realism, including academic classicism and Spanish genre, influenced him in various degrees.
His devotion to the Catalan modernism movement in Barcelona, as well as his encounter with Post-Impressionist and Symbolist painting in Paris, had an important, although brief, impact on his oeuvre.
During his Blue Period years, Picasso's group of friends widened, and he became particularly close with poets Guillaume Apollinaire (1880—1918) and André Salmon (1881—1969).
[7] Justin Thannhauser (1892—1976), the last owner of the painting before he bequeathed it to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, was a critical figure to the advancement of modern art in Europe.
[10][11][12][13] By using color and form to evoke notions about the subject of the work, Picasso depicts the laundress in neutral tones and in a tense, angular manner, expressing poverty, loneliness, and suffering.
[14] Picasso decontextualizes the woman by removing her from a specific place and time and keeps her anonymous, using her tired female body, hardened by challenge and labor, to generalize human tragedy.
During the late 19th and early 20th century, works such as Gustave Courbet's The Stonebreakers (1849) and Jean-Fraçois Millet's The Gleaners (1857) depicted the hardships of workers, bringing their untold stories to the forefront.
While these social, economic, and political complexities formed Picasso's sympathies, perceptions, and expressions, many scholars argue that his apparent interest is less ideological than dramatic.
Picasso successfully attempts to reduce the heaviness found in sculptural figures painted in dark-valued monochromatic hues, by lightening color and elongating form.
For example, when asked to discuss Seated Woman and Child, more than fifty years after its completion in 1901, it is reported that Picasso replied with a "touch of regret," mentioning a lost work that lay beneath it.
Even though an artist has the option of scraping off an earlier work, or covering an old image with an even coat of ground to prepare the surface for the new painting, Picasso did this very rarely.
The need to revise the original restoration of the work conducted in the 1950s, as well as earlier imaging process and findings, led to an in-depth technical-scientific study[19] of Woman Ironing.
[19] Even though the current methods allowed for a better view of the brushwork and contours of the man's portrait beneath Woman Ironing, the resulting new infrared images do not provide accurate details of its painting palette.
Up to now, microscopic analysis revealed that the true colors of the male portrait include rosy flesh tones and a bright red necktie.