Female nude in profile 1906

This is a drawing of a female nude in profile, made by Pablo Picasso, using, it looks like, charcoal or graphite. It's all about line and tone, right? The figure is built up with these soft, smudgy marks, which is a really physical process. You can almost feel Picasso’s hand moving across the paper. Look how the light kind of melts into the form, creating these subtle gradations. There's this real sense of volume, even though it's just black and white. The way he’s shaded the area around her abdomen, it gives it this incredible sense of depth. It's like, she's breathing, you know? It reminds me of some of the earlier modernist drawings, like those by Modigliani, where the focus is on this kind of elongated, elegant form. But Picasso brings this raw, almost primitive energy to it. It’s like he’s trying to capture something essential about the human form, rather than just creating a pretty picture. It’s this tension between observation and expression, and that’s what makes it so powerful.