BOY LEADING A HORSE
PABLO PICASSO, 1905-06
A naked kid, walking a horse. That's the whole picture. Now look at his right hand. Closed in a fist at the horse's chest. Look for what's in it. Nothin'. No rope, no bridle, no halter. Check the whole horse. Not one piece of leather on the animal. It follows him anyway. People love that part. Sure. It's the wrong mystery. The real one is the land. No road. No water. No buildings, trees, or people. Pink dirt, low hills, a sky doing the bare minimum. An old MoMA catalogue calls it "a kind of nonenvironment." Fancy way of saying there's nothing out there. Paris, winter into 1906. Picasso is planning something huge. A watering place. Horses drinking, riders, boys. And through the middle, this kid leading a horse to the water. He works it out over and over. Gouache, watercolor, a drawing, a little drypoint. Then he drops it. The big picture never gets made. But this kid he keeps. Cuts him out of the crowd and gives him a canvas over seven feet tall. A real face. Calm. Classical. Clock that face. The rest of this room is what happens to it. Everything else from the plan is gone. The riders. The boys. Even the water. Maybe that's why the place reads like nowhere. You're looking at the middle of a picture that doesn't exist. One more thing. The plan survived. MoMA owns the drypoint. Barely bigger than a postcard. Every rider, every horse, this same boy. The whole plan fits in your hand. The boy Picasso kept needed seven feet.