Musketeer 1970

This is Picasso’s *Musketeer*, made with oil on canvas, sometime in 1970, a few years before he died. Look at the surface, the colors: it's a carnival of greens, reds, yellows, and browns, all held by the thick, confident black outlines. I love the strange face, the almost cartoonish eyes, and the way the brushstrokes seem to dance around the figure. I imagine Picasso at ninety, still wrestling with paint, still trying to reinvent the figure. He's pulling from art history – those romantic musketeers! – but he's also just playing, pushing the paint around, seeing what happens. It’s like he's in conversation with painters of the past, like Rembrandt, but also with himself, with all the styles he invented and reinvented over his long career. It's a reminder that painting is a form of thinking, a way of seeing, and that it's never really finished, but always changing and evolving.