Pablo Picasso

Picasso painted his second self portrait while he was working on another piece, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Painted in 1907, Picasso created this piece after he decided to take a break from working on Les Demoiselles. Besides this self portrait, Picasso also did another self portrait in 1901during his Blue Period.

The face of Picasso reflects the faces in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Having a three-dimensional sculpture quality, both the Demoiselles and Picasso faces seem something like a statue. According to rumour, earlier that year Picasso bought two simple Iberian head sculptures from the secretary of Apollinaire, a French poet. The sculptures were stolen from the Louvre in Paris, one of the largest museums in the world.

The woman in Asleeep, painted in 1932, is again Marie Therese, Picasso's mistress. The two colors red and green are so bold and intense that they accentuate the tranquility of Marie Therese while sleeping. Like the women in Picasso's neoclassical period, Marie does not have any "expression or character" written on her face. Instead, her face is almost unpleasantly sizable and unchanging, which is how the women were portrayed during that period of Picasso's painting.