"Girl Before a Mirror" is a Picasso work that is one of a series utilizing the model Marie-ThTrFse. A showing of the painting offered an assessment of the work in the catalog:
Achieves metamorphosis of traditional Vanity image, in which a woman looking in the mirror sees herself as a death's head; here, figure with double head is reflected as somber-faced but voluptuous image.
The painting is from March 1932. It was produced in the style Picasso was using at the time and evoked an image of Vanity such as had been utilized in art in earlier eras, though Picasso shifts the emphasis and creates a very different view of the image. The work is considered in terms of the erotic in Picasso's art, and critics in different periods have offered their assessments of the work to show a wide range of reactions.
Picasso was part of a movement that would become known as Modernism, a name which included a number of different artistic styles and aesthetic responses. Modernism is a term applied retroactively to certain literary and artistic trends at the beginning of the twentieth century. The disjointed time sense, the flight from the conventions of realism, and the adoption of complex new forms and styles in the modernist period were undertaken to provide new meaning, to illuminate the world in a different way, and to show different relationships within the observed world. Modernism rejected traditions that existed in the nineteenth century and sought to stretch the boundaries, striking out in new directions and with new techniques. More was demanded of the reader of literature or the viewer of art. Answers were not presented directly to issues raised, but instead the artist demanded the participation of the audience more directly in elucidating meaning and in seeing the relationship between technique and meaning.
In part, this was a response to the discovery and dissemination of ideas from psychology showing the complexitie...