The Weeping Woman, I, a monumental 1937 etching shown here in its third and seventh states, is one of Pablo Picasso’s greatest achievements in printmaking, and perhaps in any medium. This is tied not only to its large size—unusual for an etching—but also to the fact that the artist strengthened the elaborate composition through seven separate stages, or states. An icon of catastrophic suffering, the work reprises one of the central figures in Picasso’s famous mural-size painting Guernica, made earlier the same year after the Basque town of Guernica, in northern Spain, was bombed at the behest of Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War. The image also refers to the Surrealist photographer Dora Maar, known for her glossy black hair and tapered fingernails, with whom Picasso had a tempestuous relationship. Until recently, The Weeping Woman, I represented one of the last major gaps in MoMA’s collection of works by Picasso; the Museum acquired an impression of the print’s third state in 1999 and the seventh and final state in 2011. Examples of both had been at MoMA from 1939 until 1981, when they were returned to Spain along with Guernica, which the artist had loaned to the Museum.

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