Portrait of Fernande Olivier 1909

This portrait of Fernande Olivier is by Picasso, and it feels like he built it up, almost like a sculpture. Just imagine Picasso, circling his subject, trying to find her form in these shifting planes of grayish browns, sandy yellows, and cool blues. You can see how the paint is applied in these deliberate strokes, each facet carefully considered and placed like a piece of a puzzle. It's like he's asking, "How can I capture the essence of this person, not just how they look, but how they exist in space and time?" I imagine him thinking about Cézanne, about how to break down form and rebuild it on the canvas, or maybe about the masks and sculptures he saw in ethnographic museums. There's a real conversation happening here, across cultures and time periods, about how we see and represent the world. What a painter!