In a work done on 2 January 1932 Picasso drew on the fruits of his sculptural work and transferred those insights, with slight variations of detail, to paint. This picture, "Reading", shows a seated woman, her body disassembled and reconstructed. Picasso proceeded to work variations on this process. One shows a woman seated in a red armchair, her arms, hands, torso, breasts and head spherical or club-like shapes, as if hewn from stone. Picasso was transferring the tactile qualities of sculpture into his painting. In the combination of semi-abstract, stylized forms with clear reminiscences of the human body, such paintings continue the 1927-1928 variations on the subject of bathers which Picasso had repeatedly drawn.
This series peaked in April 1932 in the painting "Woman with a Flower". Two-dimensional areas of colour, boldly and sweepingly outlined, are juxtaposed with similar areas that bear witness to a modelling, three-dimensionalizing instinct. The head is like a kidney, with lines for mouth, nose and eyes. The picture is related to a sculpture done the previous year in which the long, irregular cylinder of the stand looks like an Alice in Wonderland neck and supports a head made of a number of smoothly interlocking heart-shaped solids. The eyes are scratched in as flat, pointed ovals. The mouth is a declivity walled about by a roll of flesh. And the nose has been displaced.