NUDE WITH JOINED HANDS
PABLO PICASSO, 1906
Picasso took a real woman, about twenty, and gave her a face about two thousand years old. He didn't ask. He just decided she'd be better as something ancient. Look at her. The body's a real person. Pink skin, real weight, someone you could point to. Then the face. Flat. Almond eyes, a small shut mouth. That's not her face. It's a mask, lifted off ancient sculpture, carved before Rome existed. He bolted it onto a living woman. So you're wondering... Where'd he get that idea? That spring he'd stopped dead in a room of ancient Iberian heads at the Louvre, and something clicked. He hauls his girlfriend Fernande off to Gósol, a village up in the Pyrenees, and spends the whole summer more interested in two-thousand-year-old faces than the one he brought with him. Same stretch, he's painting Gertrude Stein. Can't get her face. Sits her eighty times, gives up, wipes it out, finishes it from memory as one of these masks. People tell him it looks nothing like her. He just shrugs. Says, she will. Like reality was running a little behind. That portrait hangs at the Met, right across town. Go see if he was right. So that's what's happening to the woman in front of you. He's not really painting her. He's painting what he decided she should be, and pulling her backwards, one body part at a time.