Seated Woman 1930

Picasso’s Seated Woman is a painting of flat planes, created with oil on canvas. I’m struck by how he’s used simple shapes – triangles, rectangles, and curves – to build a figure that's both familiar and totally strange. The colors are bold and direct. Look at the way the red of her dress butts up against the yellow of the background, it’s like he’s challenging our eyes to make sense of it all. It’s pure process, he's thinking about how the thing is made, not just what the thing is. The woven pattern on her shoulder is especially interesting. Each little stroke is so deliberately placed, like he's constructing this woman piece by piece. There's a physicality to the paint, it’s not trying to hide itself. Picasso is having a conversation with Cezanne, with Matisse, about how to represent the world, and how to make painting present as painting. It’s not about capturing reality, but about creating a new one.