GIRL WITH A MANDOLIN (FANNY TELLIER)
PABLO PICASSO, 1910
Good news. This is the one you can actually see. Start with her head. Tipped down, off to one side, like she's watching her own fingers. Hair up in a bun. Below that, an actual mandolin. The round body, the dark sound hole, the neck climbing up to the right with her fingers on it. In this room, that's practically a photograph. The woman had a name. Fanny Tellier. Posing was her job. She'd sat for some of Picasso's friends, and she offered to sit for him. Then the sittings just kept going. Whatever she signed up for, it wasn't this. So Fanny says she's sick. Then she stops coming altogether. And Picasso stops. You can see that too. Some parts he took all the way. Look at the breast. Round, shaded, downright classical. Other parts get one thin wash of gray and then nothing. The painting quit when she did. And past the name, the record on Fanny is nearly empty. For decades, Picasso didn't even say who she was. Now the strange part. The autumn before, Paris put on a show of Corot. Gentle old landscape painter. Dead before either of them was born. But these were the ones he'd kept back. Figures. Quiet women sitting in studios, holding mandolins more than playing them. Twenty-four of them. Picasso walked through the show with Braque, the guy he was inventing all this with. And within a year, both of them had painted a woman with a mandolin. Braque's is in Madrid. This is Picasso's. The most radical painter in Europe, covering a dead man's tune. Maybe that's what the instrument is doing here. Give somebody a mandolin, and suddenly she can sit there like a pitcher on a table. Years later, somebody called it unfinished. He just shrugged, and said: "I really don't see what I could have added."