Woman in Red Sweater

In the mid-nineteen-thirties, Antonio Berni’s work alternated between large scenes tied to social concerns ("Manifestación" [Demonstration] and "Desocupados" [The Unemployed], both from 1934) and portraits, mostly of his family and loved ones, with an air of mystery and strangeness. The enigmatic figure in "La mujer del sweater rojo", a portrait of Nina Terré—close friend of the artist and of his wife, Paule Cazenave, when they lived in Rosario—forms part of that second line of work. Melancholy, the model for this canvas rests her elbow on a table, lost in thoughts that appear to have no end. Unlike other portraits with small background images of the outskirts of cities or the impactful banks of the Paraná River, the figure in "La mujer del sweater rojo" is in an interior empty but for the geometric shapes on which she rests her elbow. For this work, Berni appealed to a polished realism, combining different pictorial strategies: the sober shapes of the face and hands, the exacting detail in the hair and sweater, the emphatic lighting of the geometric volumes, and the deep and shadowy background.