Seating nude 1908

Pablo Picasso made this small sculpture, Seating Nude, out of clay, at an unknown date. It's all about the process here, right? You can see the immediacy of the artist's touch, that it was made quickly, intuitively. There's a rawness to the way the clay is handled, almost like he's wrestling with it. The color is earthy, natural, like the clay was dug straight from the ground. It's not trying to be anything it's not. You can see every mark, every indentation. Look at the way the light catches on the rough surface! There's a tension between abstraction and figuration. It's a nude, but it's also a collection of forms, of angles and curves. It reminds me a bit of some of Rodin's clay studies, which are similarly unrefined, direct. It's like Picasso is thinking out loud, working through an idea in three dimensions.