Nude with Joined Hands

Pablo Picasso, 1906 · Gallery 502 · Floor 5

Picasso took his girlfriend Fernande and gave her a face about two thousand years old. Look at her. The body's still a real person. Pink skin. Real weight. Bent knee. Hands clasped together. Then the face. Flat. Almond eyes. Little shut mouth. Like somebody carved it. And Fernande's not the first woman this happened to. All that winter, Gertrude Stein had been sitting for Picasso. Eighty or ninety times, according to Stein. And he could not get her face right. Then one day, he paints the whole head out. "I can't see you any more when I look." He says. Right around then, Picasso sees ancient Iberian sculpture at the Louvre. Faces more than two thousand years old. Flat. Almond eyes. Small mouths. Then he and Fernande head up to Gósol in the Pyrenees. And he starts this painting. Look at the face again. There they are. By the end of the summer, Picasso's back in Paris. He finishes Stein's portrait without another sitting. Same hard, simplified face. People tell him it doesn't look like her. Picasso says, "She will." That portrait's at the Met, right across town. And Gertrude Stein bought this painting too. She kept it for the rest of her life. Thirty-three years. So after all that trouble over her own face, she spent thirty-three years with this one.

▶ Listen on Listen to Frank

Also in Gallery 502