Nude woman with turkish bonnet 1955

Picasso painted this nude with a Turkish bonnet at some point in his life, though we're not exactly sure when. It’s kind of like looking over Picasso’s shoulder as he figures it out, right? I mean, there’s the barest hint of the brushstrokes suggesting the whiteness of the wall behind her, but then look at the color choices, the lavender and mauve of the limbs, the turquoise face, the indigo of the hat. You can sense him thinking, what if I make her skin blue? What if the two sides of her face are different? It’s like a back-and-forth, this painting—a dialogue between the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown, like he’s asking himself, "What does it mean to really see?" I mean, how else can you explain the way the parts fit together, or don't quite fit? But that's the joy of painting, isn't it? The way you're always building on what came before, always learning from the masters who paved the way.