Artist's studio 1916

This drawing is by Pablo Picasso, and it’s called “Artist’s Studio.” It’s hard to date exactly when it was made, but you can almost feel the scratch of the pencil on paper. I like to imagine Picasso in his studio, maybe Paris, cigarette smoke curling around his head as he maps out the space and the forms within it. Look at those lines, they seem so tentative, almost like he’s feeling his way through the composition, erasing and redrawing, trying to capture the essence of the studio. There’s a figure on a canvas and other figures in the room, but they’re all broken down into these angular shapes that hint at their forms without fully revealing them. It reminds me a bit of Braque, and all those other early cubist artists, all of them riffing off one another, taking these shapes and forms apart and then putting them back together again in ways that challenge our ways of seeing. It’s a conversation across time, across studios, across canvases, where one painter answers another with every gesture and mark.