Orlan: The Women Who Cry Are Angry Musée national Picasso-Paris

Musée national Picasso-Paris is launching a program of interventions by contemporary artists to question Picasso's posterity and create debate around his work. The series begins with French artist Orlan (born in 1947) has been chosen to take up the current debates around the misogyny of the painter who, in his own words, considered women as "machines to suffer".

Orlan appropriates a... Show more

Musée national Picasso-Paris is launching a program of interventions by contemporary artists to question Picasso's posterity and create debate around his work. The series begins with French artist Orlan (born in 1947) has been chosen to take up the current debates around the misogyny of the painter who, in his own words, considered women as "machines to suffer".

Orlan appropriates a series of paintings and drawings by Picasso, known as Weeping Women. By depicting these weeping figures in the late 1930s, Picasso intended to denounce the disasters of the Spanish Civil War and the atrocities committed by the fascist regimes. Orlan's goal is to pay respect to the women in the canvas. "From objects, I wanted to make them become subjects, conscious of the possibility of emancipating themselves by transforming their tears into anger, to pass from victims to action, to revolt.”

The result is a brutal hybridization between Orlan's body, fragmented into several pieces (hands, mouth, teeth), and the work of the Spanish painter, fusing the aesthetics of collage to the digital age.