For this week's blog post I want to explore a piece by Pablo Picasso. His style of cubism used to be something that I did not enjoy at all, but when I took an art appreciation class I grew a love for it. Now, especially with this class and other art classes that I am taking, I have begun to see how this style can be used to represent multiple personalities or identities. Picasso created this painting from a compile of other drawings, some of them were drawings of his wife and others were from drawings of his mistress. This fact was interesting to me because it fits so well with the cubism theme. When you look at this painting it plays with your mind and makes you question whether it is one person or two, but maybe that was his intention with morphing it from two people. Given that artists paint emotion into their work, it leads me to believe that he was split between his feelings of his wife and his mistress. In the painting, depending on which angle you view it, it almost looks as if it is two faces looking at each other. Maybe this is how Picasso felt with his two loves or maybe he's representing how they felt. It makes me feel like it's representing how women were often pitted against each other, even in their marriages they still had to worry about their husbands having mistresses. The expressions on their faces make me think it's how someone would feel when they are forced to live their unexpressed self. Maybe these two women knew about each other and they were forced to live with the fact that their husband/lover was seeing someone else and they had to act like they were ok with it. And even if they did not know about it I'm sure they suspected it and they still had to act as if everything was ok. This problem still happens today but I don't know if it's very often that the wife and mistress will have a piece of art representing it. This piece can relate to dual identity in the way that it could be a representation of doppelgangers being trapped within us. The face appears to be two different faces to me, yet they are connected to each other. While Picasso knew that his wife and mistress were two different people physically, he might have viewed them quite similar in their identity which could have been why he chose to morphe this painting from two people.
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