The Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936 when the Fascist General Franco took up arms against the democratically elected Republican government. In January 1937 Picasso, a supporter of the Republic, was asked to paint a mural for the Spanish Government pavilion at the Paris World's Fair that year. The artist agreed, but it wasn’t until April that he started work on the piece, two days after German bombers, sent by Hitler on behalf of Franco, attacked and devastated the Basque town of Guernica. Sparked by this event, Picasso’s mural, Guernica, was a canvas twenty feet wide picturing a scene of massacre and suffering in which women and children were the principal victims.

One of the main groups in Guernica features a screaming, weeping woman holding her dead child. Picasso made numerous studies of the woman's head during the painting of the picture but, after its completion on 4 June 1937 he repeatedly returned to the theme. Tate’s Weeping Woman, dated by Picasso 26 October 1937, is one of four oil paintings made by the artist between June and October that year, and is the last and the most complex and elaborate of the series. In it the emotion of grief is expressed with great concentration and intensity through both form and colour. The focus of the composition is the jagged area of hard blue and white forms around the mouth and teeth, clenched savagely on a handkerchief. The forehead and eyes are also fragmented and dislocated, the pupils seeming to reflect military planes. The woman appears almost literally 'broken up' with grief.

The power and immediacy of this painting, in part conveyed by the harsh, vibrant colour scheme, also undoubtedly stems from the fact that it is a highly personal image. The features of the weeping woman are modelled on Picasso's partner at the time, the photographer Dora Maar, who had been closely involved with the making of Guernica, taking a series of photographs of it through the stages of its creation.

Both intensely personal and an emblem of the suffering of the Spanish nation, Weeping Woman captures a mood of moral anxiety that haunted those who witnessed the war from abroad.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was born in Málaga, Spain. He lived and worked in Paris and the south of France.