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©Pablo Picasso - Woman in green 1943

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From Fondation Beyeler, Switzerland:
This impressive painting, presumed to have been executed in 1944, appears to show Dora Maar enthroned on a chair in a narrow, confined room with her gaze fixed on the viewer. Some aspects of the painting suggest that Picasso was well acquainted with another work in the Fondation’s collection, Cézanne’s Madame Cézanne. Besides the position of the hands, depicted in a similar way in both paintings, a parallel can be observed in the space on the right between the arm and the body, which in both works shows something other than what we might expect. In Cézanne we see the wall rather than the armchair, in Picasso a section of the wall but without the anticipated corner of the room. Thus, towards the end of the war Picasso was referring back to the cherished touchstone Cézanne; whereas Cézanne portrays his wife with cool aloofness, Picasso gives Dora a dog’s head – an expression, perhaps, of how relations with her had deteriorated since May 1943 and the arrival of Françoise Gilot?