The Architect's Table

Pablo Picasso, 1912 · Gallery 503 · Floor 5

This is called The Architect's Table. Except, there's no architect. Honestly, there's barely a table. There's an oval. And inside it, there's a pipe. A bottle. A wine glass. Some sheet music. And a set square. Or, you know, pieces of all those things. Picasso's Cubism has gotten to the point where everything is disappearing into this brown fog of edges and angles. You grab for an object and it kind of slips away. Except, there are two women hiding in here. You don't get their faces. You get their names. The first one, you can't miss. MA JOLIE. Big block letters right across the sheet music. Means "my pretty one." It's from a popular song at the time. But it's also Picasso's nickname for his lover, Eva Gouel. So Eva gets the billboard. And Gertrude? Gertrude gets a calling card. Look down in the lower right. Tiny little painted card. Miss Gertrude Stein. So, one winter day, she stops by Picasso's studio. He's not there. She leaves her card. And Picasso just... paints the thing straight into the picture. Which is such a strange little detail. One woman gets giant letters. The other barely gets a signature. The lover, he shouts. The visitor, he whispers. And then, okay, here's the ending. A couple years later, Gertrude buys the painting. First Picasso she ever bought completely on her own. Her name was already in it.

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