Seated bather 1930

"Seated Bather" was made by Pablo Picasso with oil on canvas, and it’s currently chilling here at MoMA. What grabs me first about this piece is the limited palette and these strange, stilted shapes. They feel both archaic and totally modern, like Picasso’s playing with the building blocks of form itself. Look at the way he's applied the paint. It’s thin, almost translucent in places, letting the texture of the canvas peek through. Then there are these deliberate, scratchy lines that build up the form of the figure. It reminds me that painting is always a process, an accumulation of gestures and decisions that build into something, even when that something is as weird and wonderful as this bather. Focus on the head. It’s all geometry, sharp edges, and strange angles. There's this feeling that it is caught somewhere between representation and abstraction, a tension that reminds me a little of Leger, another artist who was deeply invested in the power of simple forms. In the end, the painting leaves me with more questions than answers, but that’s the beauty of art, isn’t it?