Femme écrivant 1934

Picasso’s painting, "Femme écrivant," presents a woman writing, rendered in his signature Cubist style. You can see how he’s mapped out these different facets of a figure in space, almost like he’s building up an image in layers. Looking closely, you can see that the paint application is really direct and confident. Picasso is working with a fairly muted palette - grey, pink, brown - alongside flashes of intense colour. It’s almost as if he’s thinking about the relationships between these different colour blocks as he composes. Notice the confident black outlines that carve out these forms. Take the hand, for example, holding the pen; the pink, red, and white are blocked out with almost brutal intensity. The marks really emphasize the flatness of the picture plane. I always think about the work of Philip Guston in relation to late Picasso; that same commitment to intuitive mark making, even if it looks clumsy or awkward. In the end, art is never really resolved, it’s always a work in progress.