Explore the Background of this artwork.
Picasso painted several portraits of his lover Dora Maar in which her face is distorted in a manner similar to Lichtenstein's painting. Such portraits were an expressionist development of the fragmented forms of his earlier Cubist works. A 1941 Picasso of Maar entitled Dora Maar au Chat sold at auction for $95,216,000 in 2006.Lichtenstein specifically used the 1939-40 portrait of Maar in the Morton G. Neumann Family Collection as the template for Woman with Flowered Hat. Neumann himself had sent a reproduction of the portrait to Lichtenstein after seeing one of Lichtenstein's earlier reworkings of a Picasso painting.Lichtenstein painted Woman with Flowered Hat when he was pastiching various types of sources, including commercial illustrations, comic imagery and modernist masterpieces. The masterpieces represented what could have been dubbed the "canon" of art and was thought of as "high art," while the "low-art" subject matter included comic strip images. His masterworks sources included the likes of Cézanne, Mondrian and Picasso. During this time in his career, Lichtenstein noted that "the things that I have apparently parodied I actually admire." The painting is one of four variations on Picassos that Lichtenstein created during 1962 and 1963.
Dora Maar Cubist Dora Maar au Chat Mondrian Cézanne