Bather 1908

This is Picasso's *Bather*, an oil painting that captures a nude figure on a beach using cool blues, greys, browns and white. Look at those brown angular shapes that describe the bather’s body, almost like a rough-hewn sculpture. I can imagine Picasso stepping back from the canvas, tilting his head, adding another stroke, maybe wiping one away. It's physical, right? That gesture of the arm raised to shield her eyes, has a sense of looking outward, maybe thinking about something or someone in the distance? The white drapery is like a curtain. This introduces a fascinating play of concealment and revelation, echoing the ambiguities inherent in painting itself. The materiality here is clear; a surface scored, inscribed, and reworked, each mark an assertion, a question, a possibility. Picasso was in conversation with the painters that came before him. It makes me think about the legacy of painting and the idea that artists are always building on each other's work, riffing off each other, in a never-ending visual dialogue.