GIRL BEFORE A MIRROR
PABLO PICASSO, 1932
Two faces. The one on the left is hers. Lilac down one side, hot yellow down the other, like she's half in sunlight. Now the mirror. She reaches for it, and what comes back is not what she put in. Darker. Heavier. The face has sunk. The body has thickened. Something older is looking back at a woman who, on this side of the canvas, is twenty-two. That gap is the painting. Her name was Marie-Thérèse Walter. She's coming up out of the Métro outside Galeries Lafayette when a stranger takes her by the arm and says, "I'm Picasso. You and I are going to do great things together." She was seventeen. He was forty-five. And married. He kept her hidden for years and painted her constantly. Soft curves, closed eyes, gold light, while his wife was in the next room. Then he paints this one. And look at what he puts behind her. Diamonds. The Harlequin pattern Picasso had been using since he was young, almost like a costume for himself. So she's standing inside something that already belongs to him. Maybe the mirror isn't showing Marie-Thérèse what she sees in herself. Maybe it's showing what Picasso has already decided she can be. He gets both faces. Picasso moved on. Then moved on again. And then he died. Marie-Thérèse killed herself four years later. The painting didn't know that. But now you do. Alfred Barr, MoMA's first director, wrote that of everything Picasso painted that spring, all of it Marie-Thérèse, this was the one Picasso liked best. Of course it was.