The Weeping Woman

I’m standing inside the Museum of Modern Art in New York City observing a drawing by one of the most iconic artists of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso. 

It’s an uncomfortably muggy summer day in the city. I’m in a tank top and shorts feeling grateful for a bit of respite from the heat. 

I snap a selfie standing in front of a painting that is part of a series aptly named, The Weeping Woman. It's the first of several paintings from Picasso’s cubist period that depicts a woman contorting in pain and anguish after losing her child in the Spanish Civil War.

I shift uneasily as I stare at her eyes ghoulishly bulging from their sockets, staring up at something draped over her forehead, blood pouring all over her hair. She’s baring all of her teeth. They’re jutting from her gums like tiny gravestones. She is as frightening as she is grotesque. 

The people behind me talk so loudly, their voices echo in the cavernous room. Impatient children cry out in boredom and frustration. I turn to glare at them, feeling irritated by the noise. 

My attention returns to The Weeping Woman. 

I remember seeing it for the first time in an art book when I was in college. It’s hard to explain my fascination with that particular series. There was something about the woman that intrigued me but also frightened me. Maybe it was the brash display of emotions, so flagrant and unapologetic, that made me want to distance myself. It was a level of pain I did not grasp.  

Now I’m staring at the same painting, 34 years later, marveling over the sense of kinship I feel with the woman in the painting. My child has died recently. Loss is no longer something abstract and remote that happens to other people in war torn countries. It is very real and personal. It is, in my experience, life imitating art. It’s supposed to be the other way around, or at least that’s how I’ve heard it, but not in this instance. I don’t want to turn away or view it with the morbid curiosity I once felt. I look at the Weeping Woman with deep understanding and empathy because now I'm the weeping woman. 

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