How do hue value and contrast contribute to the overall palete of Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror?

Question

This is a humanities question I have no idea how to answer, I know nothing about art and am taking this course independent study. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Nancy, this would be a fairly hard question even for a studio art student or an art history student.  If this is being asked in some kind of general "humanities" independent study course, well, I think that isridiculous.  Even the definitions of those words are not so easy.  

"Hue" essentially means color, as in red, yellow, blue and everything in between.  "Value" is the relative lightness or darkness of a color.  (Imagine the painting in black and white and it will be easier to see the differences in the color values.)  And "contrast" within a painting is the range of lightness to darkness, the range of values.  An image that ranges all the way from say black to white has high contrast.  One that is made up of say a bunch of greys, has low contrast.

So, asking how do hue, value and contrast contribute to the overall palette of "Girl Before a Mirror,"  is not actually THAT involved a question.  The "overall palette" is just the colors and values he chose for this particular painting.  "Girl Before a Mirror" has lots of different hues; a bunch of different values -- though the majority are either light values or deep (squint your eyes to see that easily); and this dichotomy of values makes for high contrast.

Of course you have to say more than this.  I can't really do your homework here.  But hopefully this helps a little.  I'd also suggest, as a nod toward some thematic discussion of the palette, to look at the difference between the way he painted the "real" girl, and the way he painted the reflected girl as far as these questions of hue and contrast, and think about what those differences could possibly mean psychologically.  (The "real" face is much brighter in value than the reflected face.)