Seated Francoise with blue dress 1949

This is Picasso’s "Seated Francoise with Blue Dress", made with oil on canvas. It’s wild how he takes a subject like a seated woman and turns her into an almost abstract puzzle. Look at the face. It's green, for one, and made up of different planes and angles. The lines are bold, and the colors are laid down flatly, but it’s the way they come together that's so interesting. It's like he’s showing us multiple perspectives all at once. And then there’s the blue dress. Such a simple block of color, but it’s got these cool, almost accidental drips that add to the loose, energetic feeling of the whole painting. Picasso was always pushing boundaries, and you can see that here in his willingness to break down forms and reassemble them in unexpected ways. You can see echoes of Cezanne in this piece, but where Cezanne was interested in volume and form, Picasso is flattening everything out. And those hands, they remind me a little of Philip Guston's later work; loose, cartoonish and powerful. It's a constant conversation, this thing we call art, isn't it?