Size: 500 pieces
Dimensions: 64cm x 51.25cm
Producer: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, #9042
Painting: Girl before a Mirror, 1932
Artist: Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, known as Pablo Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973), was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. [Wiki]
Notes:
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 “selves.” The diamond-patterned wallpaper recalls the costume of the Harlequin, the comic character from the commedia dell’arte with whom Picasso often identified himself—here a silent witness to the girl’s psychic and physical transformations. [The Museum of Modern Art, MOMA Highlights]
How can I order this Puzzle?
John, I have found it at a second hand store. I no longer have this puzzle. I suggest checking eBay or, perhaps, the The Museum of Modern Art in New York would know where to find this puzzle since they are listed as a manufacturer.