At the Bath. Woman in a Hat with Flowers and Woman Draped in a Towel (Au bain) 1934

Picasso made this etching, "At the Bath," with bare lines that suggest a whole world of form. I love how he’s stripped everything down to the barest essentials, like a sculptor removing clay to reveal the figure within. Look at the woman on the left, how her crossed arms and legs are rendered with the simplest of lines, yet they convey so much about her pose. The other woman's drapery is so angular, it's like cubism in cloth. The process is so visible. The plate was wiped back, but not perfectly, leaving a ghostly trace of ink that feels intimate. It makes me think of Matisse, how he also used line to define form and space. But Picasso’s lines here are a bit more raw, more direct. It's like he’s saying, "Here it is, the essence of form, take it or leave it." It's a conversation, really, a back-and-forth between artists across time, each adding their own voice to the mix.