Jeanne (Reclining nude) 1901

This reclining nude titled Jeanne was painted by Pablo Picasso, using oil on canvas. Look at the way Picasso builds the composition, with the nude figure resting upon a green and yellow base, offset against the blue vertical strokes of the background. The marks are visible, gestural and immediate. The way he depicts the woman's flesh with such loose, painterly strokes. It is like he’s working it and reworking it, building up the surface, not to arrive at a perfect image of a body, but to build a structure with the paint itself. Notice how the shadows under her limbs are created with these short strokes of green and blue, like he’s building up the form from the ground up, embedding her within the landscape. It reminds me a little of Cezanne, how he used colour to model form and space. But whilst Cezanne worked slowly and methodically, Picasso is quicker, more gestural, almost frantic. And in that way, it anticipates his later, more expressionistic works.