Refering to the left figure which I find to be female, however, her head resembles the head of a penis and the figure as a whole suggests an erect penis. The figure on the right has a male head but a very female lower half while the figure as a whole again has the form of an erect penis, the girl's buttocks doubling as male testicles. Then in the individual figures we see deliberate contradictions. In the left-hand figure the face seen in profile is confident and assertive while the full-face view suggests a retiring sadness; the roundness of the body, which suggests pregnancy, is contradicted by the thick, harsh straightness of the figure's back. In the right-hand figure the two breasts have contrasting green patterns and at the top of the figure's bottom the black lines suggest a frontal view of the female genitals. And finally, the figure on the right should logically be a mirror-image of the figur

e on the left and this is clearly not the case. There are also puzzling religious references in the whitish shawl-cum-halo of the left-hand figure, which might suggest the Virgin, especially if the figure is pregnant, and the ribs, not the rib-bone, which go, not from Adam to Eve, but from the more female figure to the more male one.

But what does all this add up to? A great deal of confusion. Picasso appears to be looking for a solution to the male-female conundrum: in order to be attracted to man woman must presumably contain some male element. The artist piles up those factors that seem to make the problem insoluble but the result is just a series of unresolved contradictions. What is best about the painting is the suggestion of the feminine form in the lower part of the right-hand figure. The abundance of the lower back and buttocks is heightened by the fact that the shape tapers up to a point and by the suggestion of roundness and softness given by the green hoops. And tension and power is generated

We criticized the "Woman in an Armchair" for the niggardliness of the idea it expressed. Here those rough-hewn outlines have been thickened and smoothed into an expression of the matures sensuous experience. Just run your eyes along some of those full back lines that contrast so strikingly with the light color of the flesh! It is extraordinary how Picasso has managed to take an essentially schematic way of drawing (a dot = an eye etc.) and make it into a highly expressive device. We should note, too, the use of a grey-ish line that mediates between the light and dark and harmonizes the composition.

Unlike the "Girl before a Mirror" this picture does not rely on those visual double meanings that mixed the male and female elements. Here the male presence is conveyed by the treatment of the flesh, which suggests that the flesh is looked at in a male perspective, and by the hair in the mirror that comes to a point where the legs part. In the latter Picasso has found an economical symbol for wh

Some topics in this essay:
Girl Mirror, Woman Armchair, Adam Eve, Seated Bather, Mirror Picasso, Seated Woman, Picasso March, woman armchair, left-hand figure, girl mirror, Dutch Baroque, woman armchair 1929, male female, essentially schematic, picasso found, woman's body, picasso managed, armchair 1929, light dark,