This is one of the masterworks of Picasso's Neo-Classical phase, which lasted for only a brief period in the early 1920s. As in the Portrait of Olga in an Armchair, these Neo-Classical images were recognizable - there was no hint of Cubism - but they no longer meticulously recorded appearances, and they belonged to no definable place or time.
The figures Picasso painted in this style had the stature and proportions of giants, with slab-like torsos and under-aarticulated limbs, hands and feet. Their apparent clumsiness and simplified features sometimes verged on caricature (as in The Village Dance), but other examples achieve the monumental quality and sense of calm grandeur that have long represented the ideal of classicism. Seated Woman, in her simple shift, is one of these, at once timeless and unmistakably a product of modernism.
