Seated Woman (Woman with the Body of a Guitar)

What a vast distance separates this portrait from the one Rivera painted of Angelina Beloff six years earlier in Bruges, which sealed their then incipient romance. In this portrait, her features have been reduced to just a few lines, suggesting a small head and even a tiny beak, a face from which all expression has ben erased. The figure seems to be emerging, bit by bit, from a mold. Lacking foreshortening, and with little relief, the work displays utmost anatomical simplification, thus hindering any sort of psychological reading. In this, the first of three portraits of Angelina, the various elements--the cat resting in the sitter's lap, the reclining body, the range of beautiful gray, blue and white tones--provide a seren interpretation of a woman eternally disposed to waiting. (Diego Rivera. The Cubist Portraits 1913-1917; Meadows Museum, SMU; Philip Wilson Publishers)