Woman with Flowered Hat
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| Artist | Roy Lichtenstein |
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| Year | 1963 |
| Medium | Magna on canvas |
| Movement | Pop art |
| Dimensions | 127 cm × 101.6 cm (50 in × 40 in) |
| Location | Collection of Laurence Graff |
Woman with Flowered Hat is a 1963 pop art painting with Magna on canvas by Roy Lichtenstein. The work is based on a Pablo Picasso portrait of Dora Maar. In May 2013, it sold for a record price for a Lichtenstein work.
Picasso painted several portraits of his lover Dora Maar in which her face is distorted in a manner similar to Lichtenstein's painting. Such portraits were an expressionist development of the fragmented forms of his earlier Cubist works. A 1941 Picasso of Maar entitled Dora Maar au Chat sold at auction for $95,216,000 in 2006.
Lichtenstein specifically used the 1939-40 portrait of Maar in the Morton G. Neumann Family Collection as the template for Woman with Flowered Hat. Neumann himself had sent a reproduction of the portrait to Lichtenstein after seeing one of Lichtenstein's earlier reworkings of a Picasso painting.
Lichtenstein painted Woman with Flowered Hat when he was pastiching various types of sources, including commercial illustrations, comic imagery and modernist masterpieces. The masterpieces represented what could have been dubbed the "canon" of art and was thought of as "high art," while the "low-art" subject matter included comic strip images. His masterworks sources included the likes of Cézanne, Mondrian and Picasso. During this time in his career, Lichtenstein noted that "the things that I have apparently parodied I actually admire." The painting is one of four variations on Picassos that Lichtenstein created during 1962 and 1963.
Lichtenstein worked by creating a small-scale line-drawing based on the Picasso reproduction. He then projected the drawing onto the canvas, using the projected outline-drawing as a template. The artist deliberately avoided the easier option of projecting the reproduction itself. According to art scholar Michael Fitzgerald, this was because he wanted to be "true to his discipline of drawing". Lichtenstein attached the reproduction to the wall of his studio next to the painting as he worked on it. A photograph of the artist with the work in progress can be seen in an article on Lichtenstein that appeared in Life magazine at the time. Such evidence makes Woman with Flowered Hat "the most thoroughly documented of his variations after Picasso". Discussing the painting with Richard Brown Baker, Lichtenstein commented,
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