Weeping Woman is a most expressive and fantastical image of a woman in distress. The geometry and shapes in the painting are imaginative and outrageous, with bright colors, and shapes of boats and flowers that would be humorous except for the profound suffering of the woman. The woman's eyes are like tipsy boats in a rough sea, spilling tears. Diamond shaped tears are also the nails of her hands, held up to her face in fright. With a single image Picasso expresses a complex array of human anguish; terror, despair, outrage, hysteria, and death. The sad and dark eyed woman is Picasso's lover Dora Maar, but the woman is also a symbol of a victim of war or a witness to the war in Spain and spreading throughout Europe in 1937. Picasso drew and painted hundreds of images of weeping women, rape, crying birds, and tortured animals as symbols of his own grief about the war.