From the early 1960s and onwards, Roy Lichtenstein began to explore art as a theme by reinterpreting masterpieces of artists such as Paul Cézanne, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso. Between 1962 and 1963, Lichtenstein created four paintings based on Picasso’s portraits of women, the last of which is Woman with Flowered Hat (1963). The painting is based on Dora Maar with Cat (1941), a portrait of Dora Maar, the Surrealist artist who was Picasso’s lover and muse from 1936 to the mid-1940s.

The tumultuous and at times abusive relationship between Picasso and Maar was reflected in Picasso’s depictions of Maar. In Dora Maar with Cat and other paintings, Picasso depicted his muse as a tormented figure, distorting her features with jagged forms. Dora Maar with Cat also expressed Picasso’s anxiety and reaction to the troubling events of the time, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II. This angst can be sensed in the spontaneous and emotional nature of the work expressed through bold colors, jagged forms, and dense layers of paint. Lichtenstein possibly was drawn to the portrait because he tended to depict female figures in distress in comic book paintings like Drowning Girl (1963) and Crying Girl (1964).

In Woman with Flowered Hat, Lichtenstein preserved all the main elements of Picasso’s painting but made significant stylistic changes in terms of color, texture, and form. He painted the portrait in his Pop Art style that was influenced by mass-produced commercial imagery of comic books, cartoons, and advertising. This style was characterized by primary colors, flat uniform planes, black outlines, and hand-painted Ben-Day dots used in the printing process of inexpensive publications. By imitating mass-produced imagery Lichtenstein removes the painterly sensibility expressed by Picasso. His approach is calculated and meticulous, he paints in an impersonal and precise manner.

Lichtenstein conflates Picasso’s Cubism, a groundbreaking style in Modern art history with the style of cheap commercial publications and advertisements. The artist’s combination of high art and popular imagery was understood as an attack on predecessors like Picasso. However, Woman with Flowered Hat is more of an homage than a parody. Lichtenstein deals with the complex legacy of Picasso by reinterpreting it for the contemporary world saying: “Picasso has become a kind of popular object… one has the feeling there should be a reproduction of Picasso in every home”. By adapting Picasso’s painting to a contemporary society driven by consumerism and mass production, Lichtenstein gives the image new relevance. He explained: “What I wanted to express is not that Picasso was known and therefore commonplace. Nobody thought of Picasso as common. What I am painting is a kind of Picasso done the way a cartoonist does it or the way it might be described to you, so it loses the subtleties of Picasso, but it takes on other characteristics”.